Homemade Red Velvet Cupcakes

It was a pretty slow Saturday plus four straight episodes of Chuck made me want to do something else. I remembered I asked my Ate Tessa for a red velvet cupcakes recipe a long, long time ago. Decided to get up and work on those goodies. :)

My ingredients were not complete, we set off to CK Bakers in Munoz but they were closed, so met up with an old friend, Chocolate Lovers along P. Tuazon in Cubao. After wiping the dust off our baking materials and of course washing them, I immediately worked on mixing the dry ingredients first, which was very easy, all I had to do was sift. Haha.

Now came the challenging part. The recipe required buttermilk and distilled vinegar (68 pesos a bottle in Cherry Foodarama), as a substitute for the former we mixed milk and lemon; and for the latter we used lemon too. It was really hard to measure our food coloring for it was in gel form, I had to settle with putting in a dollop a time to make sure I don't overdo it. The batter had the right shade of red, yay!

The cupcakes did not only look good, they were yummy too. Happiness! :) What I didn't like was the cream cheese frosting, we settled for Magnolia cream cheese because it was the only one available at the grocery. I added a lot of confectioner's sugar and chilled it in the fridge for a few minutes but it still won't thicken. Echo had to redo it, added a full bar of cream cheese, to no avail. We're thinking it's the cream cheese, we made frosting with Philadelphia before and it turned out great.

Of course, there will be another try and hopefully by then everything will be perfect. :)