For the red velvet cake I used a recipe from BBC good food which I shall link here. I've used a lot of there recipes in the past and when I saw this one I thought it was a safe bet! I started off by getting together all of my ingredients. I tend to vary where I do my food shop from time to time, so these ingredients are from all over the place! Before anyone asks though the rainbow sugar sweets are from Sainsbury's.
Now that everything was prepared I got straight to mixing the batter! I mixed all my dry ingredients in one bowl and my wet ingredients in another. I slowly then mixed them together using my hand mixer, which won't be shown in any of these photos as it's very old and I'm desperate for a new one (any reccomendations comment below 👇👇). Once mixed together I added my food colouring, I used more then reccomended in the recipe. I wasn't sure how much to use or how red the batter should be. Looking back I should have added more but at this stage I thought it looked alright!
Once all mixed together I then used my trusty ice-cream scoop to get these into the cupcake cases. I find by using a scoop im getting an even amount of batter to fill the cases, which means they should all rise at the same level. Identical size cupcakes can score you some extra points on bake off, thought I better start getting into this habit now, just in case I ever make it onto the show (lol jokes)!
As you can see I used the brightest cupcake cases I could find and popped these babies into the oven! While that was baking it was then what I call 'tidy up time', which I didn't feel the need to document! Onto the fun stuff then.. I started preparation for the buttercream. Whenever I make buttercream I do it mostly on trial and error, I'll add a link to a website if you'd prefer a recipe. I tend to add the butter and icing sugar, mix until that tastes good. Melt the white chocolate over a saucepan and mix in together. I then scoop the buttercream into a piping bag and get to decorating!
Before I show you the finished product I wanted to talk a little bit about what pride means to me. Growing up pride wasn't spoken about and if it was it was often spoken about in a negative way. I remember my parents saying that gay pride was happening one day in town and it was a colourful parade of half naked people walking up and down the streets of Truro (which was actually not really the case). I didn't know why they would march or what it really meant. Over the years however I've learnt about this incredible community. This community it brave, beautiful and unapologetic. Going to pride events gave me the confidence to stand up and say that I'm bisexual and proud, which is something that I've struggled with in the past. Seeing members of LGBTQIA+ community speak out for what they believe in, gives me hope for the future. Pride started as a protest for the Stonewall Inn riots and it continues to be a protest for EQUALITY. All anyone ever wants is to be accepted and loved and now more then ever we have to stand up for EQUALITY amongst not just us but especially the trans community. It's something I'm very passionate about and will continue to speak up for.
I have to say.. these cupcakes didn't turn out 100% as I planned. The buttercream and decorations.. stunning! The taste of the cupcake.. good but not quite a red velvet taste to it. The colour of the cupcake.. brown.. any hint of red was gone by the time I pulled these out of the oven. Even though these didn't match up to my expectations, the people in work sure seemed to enjoy them as they were talking about them for days! I guess I'll have to try out this recipe again very very soon and hopefully find out where I went wrong. If any of you try to recreate these please tag me in your pictures, I'd love to see them!
