The Cluttered Pantry

Sharing a birthday with a sibling when you aren’t twins is a funny thing. Jordan turning 20, and Elena turning 3, on the same day, makes for a party with mini caterpillar cupcakes for the birthday girl, and mini custom recipe cheesecakes (see part two of this post) for the birthday boy.

This is Elena’s first birthday party, we were here in the states waiting for our court date this time last year. She really enjoyed Zhanna’s party in July and has been asking about when her party would come since then.

Since she also talks about butterflies and caterpillars almost every day and wants to collect stickers of them and since she is still super tiny I went with the idea of making mini cupcakes and setting them up like caterpillars and one with wings to be her special cake.

The caterpillars were just an organic red velvet cake recipe, no one at the party got the inside joke (yes pun intended) that I made the inside of the caterpillars red.) She and I both love everything tiny and bite size, so I made them in mini mini pans, it took me three stores to find the right size cupcake papers for them. There are some great resources online, I just didn’t plan far enough ahead to use them so, in the end I had to spend the extra money to get them at Sur La’ Table.

My recipe uses organic eggs, butter, cane sugar and wheat flour. You don’t have to do that, I’m just trying to get the Wee Kahunas systems up to snuff so even baked goods get some extra TLC.

Since I was using so much of the the color pastes (for the red velvet cake batter and the technicolor frosting on the caterpillars) I made sure to use India Tree decorating colors , they are made from things like beet extract for red, and cabbage for the blue, instead of ummm coal tar and a science kit for the other dyes you can buy. Since the decorating colors have a bit of a veggie taste to them my recipe for the frosting is a bit different (see the comments section for the recipe.)

Red Velvet Cupcakes – Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 1/2 cups raw cane sugar (you can use regular sugar)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1/2 cup vanilla soymilk (you can use whole milk)
• 1 tablespoon India Food Coloring
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 tablespoon distilled white vinegar
• 2 cups flour
• 2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon salt

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the eggs, buttermilk and vanilla. Stir in the baking soda and vinegar. Combine the flour, cocoa powder, natural red coloring, and salt; stir into the batter.

This batter does rise, so only fill the cupcake cups halfway.

Tiny ones take 12 minutes to bake – larger regular cupcakes should be closer to 18-22 minutes.

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