Red Velvet with Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

Have you tried this cake before?

Taste nice with a light hint of chocolate. Best part with this cake (esp. those new to this cake) is that provokes your senses with it being "RED" in colour!!

If you are allergic to artificial colouring, you might want to omit it, but then why bother as you shouldn't call it red velvet then!!!

Recipe adpated from here (yields about 32 small cupcakes)

Ingredients
390g cake flour
60g corn flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
1.5 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
60g good quality cocoa powder
180g butter, room temperature
245g caster sugar
50g brown sugar
3 eggs, room temperature
1.5 cup buttermilk
1.5 tsp white vinegar or red wine vinegar
1.5 tsp vanilla essence
2 bottles (25g each) red colouring

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 160C degrees.
2. Sieve all dry flour ingredients (flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda) together and set aside.
3. Beat butter, salt and sugar. Add eggs and beat until light and fluffy.
4. Fold in flour in parts alternating with the liquid (milk, colouring, vinegar & essence). Do not over mix. Be careful red colouring might stain.
5. Divide into paper cups (do not overfill, 1/2 to less than 3/4 would be best). Bake for 20-22 min or until skewer in the centre comes out clean.

Yes, the batter is red - well, maybe actually more auburn or dark mahogany in colour.

For the cream cheese frosting

250g cream cheese, room temperature

135g butter, room temperature

1 tbsp vanilla essence

210g icing sugar, sieved

zest of 1 lemon

Beat all ingredients until smooth.

Been wanting to pipe a rose swirl using Wilton 2D tip.
For tutorial on how-to-do, check out here.

But the lemon zest got stuck at the tip which resulted in more mutant looking frosting *darn...!!*&$@#%*. Since this was for a party, decided to change last minute the recalcitrant looking ones and opting for a classic magnolia swirl instead lolz.

Stained Glass Heart Cookies

Happy Valentine's Day.

Managed to squeeze in some time for this, a recipe I've been wanting to try for a while now.

The lollipop sticks gave the ordinary cookies a more special lolly-feel. Though it took a little more effort, I like the end results.

More lolli-kies!! hahaha

To make these stained glass lolli-kies, you need some boiled or hard candy.
LHS is some candies I bought from Tokyo; RHS are Fox candies which you can get from the supermarket locally. If you are in Australia, you can use the rainbow coloured Lifesavers tube of candy.

Using your favourite cookie recipe, cut out the centres, pre-bake them for 5 min and fill them with crushed candy. Continue baking until the cookie is baked and the candy melted. Leave to cool before carefully removing the cookie from the baking paper.

Side note: Not to put a damper on the valentine day spirit but DH and I do not celebrate Valentine. We feel its too much a commercial cliché. You shouldn't leave it all to one day in a year to declare or appreciate the one you love, you should be doing it 365-24-7!!