Pride Cupcakes

By Emma Hawkins | July 31, 2020 | Comments 0 Comment

These are coming a little after Pride but better late than never! (I made these back in June but I’m a bit behind on writing up the recipes which is why I’m only posting them now!). I don’t identify as LGBTQ+ myself, but I think it’s so important to show support whoever you are, whenever you can – especially at the moment with everything going on! These are a little time-consuming because you have to layer up the colours, but apart from that they’re super easy to make so I’d 100% recommend giving them a go!

It’s amazing how you can get cake looking so bright and colourful but still tasting delicious! I think the gel food colourings really help with this as they help you get super bright colours with only a drop or two. I used to use the bottle food colouring you get from supermarkets and you can end up having to use a whole bottle to get the right colour – which then kicks the balance of ingredients out of whack. I got this pack of 24 food colourings from Wilton for about £24 – which sounds like a lot for food colouring, but it’ll save you a good £3-4 on bottle food colouring every time you want to make something with colour in them and they will last for years! (You also get so many different colours so you can get super creative with your meringues, icings, macaroons, cakes etc!)

Recipe

Makes 12

Time: 2 hours

Ingredients

100g caster sugar
113g butter
2 eggs
50ml milk
50g natural yoghurt
1 tsp vanilla bean paste (or extract)
65g plain flour
135g self raising flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple food colouring
A few tsp of rainbow sprinkles or 100s and 1000s

For the butter cream

120g butter
200g icing sugar
1tbsp milk
½ tsp vanilla bean paste (or extract)

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180C and put 12 cupcake cases into a 12 hole cupcake tin.
Take a large bowl and make a note of it’s weight when empty.
Put the butter and sugar into the bowl and beat together with a wooden spoon until pale and creamy.
Add the eggs, milk, yoghurt and vanilla and whisk until combined.
Add the flour, baking powder, and salt and whisk again to make smooth.
Weigh the bowl with the mixture in (making sure no spoons or utensils are also being weighed!). Take the weight of the bowl away (that you noted down earlier) from the weight of the bowl + mixture so you know how much your total mixture weighs. Divide this by 7 and then put this amount of mixture into 7 bowls (so that you’ve equally divided your cake mix into 7).
Colour each bowl of cake mix differently so you have one each of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.
Carefully spoon a layer of purple cake mix into the bottom of each cupcake case (about 1tsp should do it, but go until all the mixture is used up!). Then repeat with the other colours in the order of a rainbow, finishing with the red.
Bake the cupcakes for 15-20 minutes until golden brown and risen. (You can double check by inserting a skewer into the middle and seeing if it comes out clean).
Take the cupcakes out of the tin and leave to cool on a wire rack.
Meanwhile make the buttercream. Put the butter and icing sugar into a bowl and beat until smooth. Add the milk and vanilla and beat again until combined.
Fit a pipping bag with a star shaped nozzle and spoon the icing into the pipping bag. Pipe swirls of the icing on the cooled cupcakes (the cupcakes need to be completely cool before you do this or the icing will slide off!).
Finish with a few rainbow sprinkles and enjoy!