Sweetheart Cupcakes

Bonjour! Valentine's Day is only a few days from now and I would like to show you my special Valentine's Day-themed cupcake called "Sweetheart Cupcakes". These cupcakes are just plain vanilla cupcakes, so you could use any recipe you'd like, but they're really cool when you slice them vertical because they have three different colors (although the last color didn't come out as red as I had hoped for). I got the idea from AllRecipes.com and I added a cupcake topper that I made myself.

Sweetheart Cupcakes recipe: adapted from AllRecipes.com

Ingredients: makes 28 cupcakes (I only used half of this recipe)
- 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
- 1 ½ cups cake flour (not self-rising), sifted
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
- 1 ¾ cups sugar
- 4 large eggs, room temperature
- 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 1 cups milk

Instructions:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Sift together both flours, baking powder and salt.
- With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, cream butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Beat in vanilla. Reduce speed to low. Add flour mixture in three batches, alternating with two additions of milk, and beating until combined after each.
- Divide batter evenly among lined cups, filling each three-quarters full. Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Transfer tins to wire racks to cool completely before removing cupcakes.

*Sweetheart variation:
- Fill cupcake liners ⅓ full with batter; set aside.
- Stir 4 drops of red food coloring into the remaining bowl of batter to make the batter pink, stir in the raspberry oil. Pour ⅓ of pink batter into a resealable plastic bag and set aside.
- Mix more food coloring into the remaining bowl of pink batter until it is an orange/red color and pour the batter into a resealable plastic bag. Cut a corner off the bag, stick the open tip into the center of each cup of white batter and squeeze in about two tablespoons of red batter.
- Cut the corner off the bag with the pink batter, stick the open tip into the center of the red batter and squeeze about 1 tablespoon pink batter into each cup.

Buttercream Frosting recipe:

Ingredients:
- 1 cup confectioners' sugar, sifted
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3 tablespoons milk
- 4 drops red food coloring

Instructions:
- Combine ingredients in a medium-sized bowl, and mix with an electric mixer until smooth. Add more milk if needed.


This is how the cupcake batter looks like with the three different colors used.

L'amour!

Love!

Liebe!

Liefde!

Amor!