Blue Velvet

We had our "First Annual Spirit Week" at work last week leading up to our major adoption event. I'm skeptical of anything calling itself the "First Annual" - are you SURE it will happen again? What if it's a huge failure? What if you get hit by a car and are not around to plan it the following year? Friday May 1st we were challenged to either wear our bluest outfit or bring our bluest homemade dessert. I wasn't working on Friday, but I felt obligated to out-bake everyone else. I had great success with my Red Velvet Cupcakes:

These are FILLED also, with the same cream cheese frosting. A bit much for some, but I thought it was great - kept the cuppies moist for like a week in the fridge!

This photo came out pretty good, so I decided to make greeting cards out of it! They're available in singles or sets of 6 in my Etsy shop!

I had already purchased some Electric Blue food coloring & colored sugar in a bake shop in Manhattan the week before, so I decided to go with that instead of the red using the same recipe. I tossed in a tablespoon of Captain Morgan to make up for the alcohol in the liquid food coloring I would normally use in the same recipe. Not sure if it did anything for the flavor or the texture, but I like tossing booze into just about anything.

The batter looked ridiculously awesome. I love the glossy texture this recipe gets, though I wish it wasn't due to the 1.5 cups of oil that gets dumped in there. Here's post baking:


I try not to think about the dangers and toxicity of commercial food colorings. If this cupcake gives me cancer, so be it. I'll just have an even better excuse to bake more of them and consume vast amounts before I die. I do kind of want to look into making these vegan - the only things holding up the cake batter are the eggs & buttermilk. As for the frosting, I'd have to get soy cream cheese and use margarine instead. Not too far off, but I'm kind of lazy and cheap. That and these taste so darned good already.

Moving on, I decided it wasn't enough to simply make the cupcakes blue with blue sugar. I wanted to leave the frosting white for contrast, so I needed another blue element.

Cue the marzipan!
I decided to use my Noah's Arc cookie cutters, since I work at an animal rescue organization.

The marzipan is store bought of course, but I tinted it to match the cakes, & I used silver dragees for eyes.

Didn't have any dog or cat cutters, but the elephant was sure cute.

I only got to eat 2 of the two dozen I made, but they were delicious!

I have Electric Green, Orange, & Fuchsia lined up as the next velvet colors. I'll post them as I bake them - I'm kind of hoping to do like an Andy Warhol set of cupcakes. We'll see what happens.