Red-ish Velvet Cupcakes

I was supposed to bake my mom a cake for her 50th birthday, but got a job instead. I figured it was a perfectly fine trade-off but apparently this has been in the back of her head for a year now. So on a trip back home (which included a couple long car rides, 14 hours each way) she declared I had to bake her a cake. Still reeling from the coconut cake disaster, I skipped trusting someone else's cake pans and opted for cupcakes.

BONUS! I had a sous chef for the cake! If you don't speak any French (for that matter, this is probably one of the three French words I know) sous means "under" and it's the chef's right hand man. Or in this case preteen girl. The best part is putting her on "dry stuff" duty since I hate measuring flour. This is why I always just do it by weight. This site is bookmarked on my phone (my cookin' buddy). And Alton Brown says that's the best way to do it anyway. And whatever AB says is like cooking law.



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WARNING! PG-13 Friends reference follows. If you're easily offended, please scroll down past the little stars. The only reason I ever remember this French stuff is an episode of Friends when Phoebe dates Monica's sous chef. When Phoebe first meets him and sets up a date, she says to Monica "I can't wait to get sous-neath him". So you have to say the line whenever you think about sous chefs.

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So red velvet it was, because it's fast and easy and hard to mess up. But I didn't exactly have enough red food coloring (had to raid my aunt's pantry for supplies and wasn't clear that I needed like a gallong of the stuff). So instead of the usual deep red color, they ended up more pinkish in the bowl. So red-ish velvet they are. And just for the record, my sous chef frosted most of them. :) I take no responsibility.

 Everybody ate 'em, my Dad had three and Mom took home a dozen so I suppose they were fine. Though one sad soul tried her darndest but never got even a crumb:

That's Mia, the most pathetic dog in the world.

So by the end of the evening we had a bunch of these:

But someone found a way to take care of the leftover frosting.

So Happy Birthday Nini!