Gluten Free Red Velvet Cupcakes!

First of all I want to take a moment to say hi and thank you to my new followers! I seem to have gained a few peeps. Welcome to my blog and I hope you enjoy my content!

Now to the point. I have mentioned this recipe in progress for a little while. I had been testing and tweaking in preparation for my daughter's first birthday that has just passed. Hopefully things here will calm down a bit now that the event is over, but with the dreaded Christmas on the horizon... maybe not! In any case, I have just one of these scrummy delights left after the rest have all been munched. So, the recipe!

For 12 fairy cakes or 6 cupcakes you will need:

Cases to suit the size of cakes you are making.
120g gluten free self raising flour  - I used Dove Farms White self raising blend
a heaped 1/4 teaspoon of GF baking powder
30g cocoa
115g caster sugar
45g butter
1 medium egg (room temperature)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon cider vinegar
1/2 cup milk
Red, bake stable food colouring of your choice.

The first thing to say is that if you don't want to colour these cakes, they maker perfectly scrummy chocolate fairy cakes or muffins, the colour is far from essential.

First, weigh into a bowl the flour, baking powder, cocoa and sugar. Stir till evenly mixed. It will help later.

Add your butter, egg, vanilla, and cider vinegar. Mix together. This will all come together in a paste, it takes some time and effort, but it will come together, trust me! Keep mixing till it looks like this:

See, a sort of lumpy paste.

Note: You are about to add your milk. At this point take into consideration your food colouring. The food colouring I was using was a gel, Dr Oetker's red gel colouring, and that adds fluid to the mix. And you need a LOT of colouring. If you are adding a good amount of liquid colouring, then take a tablespoon of milk away from the half cup you measured earlier.

Add your milk and beat till smooth:

 

Its like magic, you have cake batter at last. 

Add the food colouring till you are happy. I used 4 10ml tubes of the colouring mentioned above to get this colour:

 

Spoon into cake cases. Now you will need a steady hand. The mixture will have large air bubbles in it, which will create cavities and hollows in your cakes, because believe me, these will rise.

First gently shake your tray of cases side to side to level the mixture off a little. Now you need to whack the tray against a hard surface. straight up and down to force the bubbles to the surface. Do it a few times, walk away, do something for 30 seconds, and come back and do it again. I can't guarantee this will remove all of them, but it will make your cakes better than if you didn't whack the tray.

Bake at 160 degrees in a fan oven, 180 degrees in a conventional, for 20-25 minutes. Even with the large cakes my oven only takes 20 minutes to bake.

Leave to cool fully before decorating:

Now decorating. Red Velvet cake is typically iced with a cream cheese frosting. So here is what I used for mine:

130g cream cheese
40g butter
90g icing sugar
1/2 Teaspoon vanilla extract

Beat together till smooth and frost onto fully cooled cake.

That made enough to pipe onto the six cupcakes there and should do 12 fairy cakes as well. But you may need to make more or less depending on how thick you want your icing. You can make it ahead, but do store it in the fridge. The cream cheese doesn't like being in a cupboard so do plan on keeping your cakes in the fridge till they are gone. Not that I imagine they will be hanging round for long. My children have been doing a good job of demolishing them.

For an extra touch I found some wafer daisies in Tesco and decorated my cakes with them to celebrate my daughter's first birthday as you can see from the picture at the very beginning of this post. She was very pleased with them and the daisies were the first thing to be munched!

 So there we are, finally the finished recipe. Go forth and enjoy, with no gluten in sight!

Till next time!