A Sweet Life: Blue velvet cupcakes

These cupcakes were for my coworker's retirement party last Thursday. She had a red white and blue theme and I baked red velvet cupcakes as well. Instead of plain vanilla cupcakes dyed blue, I wanted to find a blue velvet one. This one is from http://oneparticularkitchen.com that I randomly found on the internet. It had cocoa powder and buttermilk, baking soda and vinegar, similar ingredients to my favorite red velvet cake recipe from Martha Stewart. So I decided to give it a go. I also loved the blue hue of the cupcake in the pictures. These turned out pretty well, tasted pretty similar to my red velvets! mmm!! I love it! I paired it with the basic cream cheese frosting. This recipe makes about 24-16 cupcakes!

Ingredients
-2 cups sugar
-½ pound (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
-2 eggs
-1 tablespoon cocoa powder
-1 Tbsp Wilton royal blue gel food coloring
-1 small dab of violet gel food coloring (I dipped in a toothpick and used that much)
-2 ½ cups cake flour
-1 teaspoon salt
-1 cup buttermilk
-1 teaspoon vanilla extract
-½ teaspoon baking soda
-1 tablespoon vinegar

Directions

Preheat your oven to 350 F and line cupcake pans with liners.

Cream sugar and butter in mixing bowl till light and fluffy, then add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each egg.

Mix cocoa and food coloring together to make a paste — this took a while to mix thoroughly with all gel, but it came together nicely; add this paste to sugar mixture and mix well again.

Sift (or buzz in food processor) flour and salt, and add to creamed mixture a bit at a time, alternating with buttermilk, then mix in vanilla. Combine baking soda and vinegar in a small bowl and add to cake batter; mix just to combine.

Look at the pretty color! :)

Scoop thick batter into cupcake liners, filling about 3 quarters full instead of the standard 2/3 because this batter doesn't rise too much.

Bake for probably 25-30 minutes, but start checking at 20 — mine were done at about the 22/23 minute mark; watch for toothpick inserted in center to come out clean. Remove cupcakes from oven and allow cool completely on a wire rack