Rainbow Cupcakes

Maybe you've heard of these. I saw them a while ago on Our Best Bites and decided that they would be perfect for a party I was hosting for House Party with Expo Washable Markers. It was a fun party with all their new washable markers and House Party sent me 15 sets of markers and dry erase boards to give away to people who came to my party. It was fun. Anyway, these cupcakes were delicious.
I used a from-scratch recipe for the cake mix because I didn't have any white cake mixes and I wanted to try this recipe. I ended up making the yellow cake mix since I used the yolk of the eggs and it didn't matter because I was dying the layers in the cupcake anyway.

For the cake batter I doubled the amounts below to make 24 cupcakes and then looked at the recipe again and realized that the recipe below was already doubled, so I guess I used twice as much batter as I should have. This recipe should still make 24 cupcakes, but they won't be as overfilled as mine were.

Cake Batter Ingredients (or you could use cake mix-whatever makes 24 cupcakes):
2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

I mixed the dry ingredients in my mixer and then added the shortening. I mixed it in until it was all crumbly and then added the eggs and milk and vanilla and kept mixing until it was all uniform and didn't have any big clumps.

I liked this recipe. It was simple and I knew for sure that I wasn't adding any ingredients that my friend's kids would be allergic to.

After it was all mixed, I pulled out six of our big cereal bowls and added 1/2 cup of batter to each bowl so I would have the same amount of each color. I made Red, Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue, and Violet (Purple). ROY-G-BIV. I left out Indigo. I think it's kind of made up anyway. I used gel food coloring. I think you know how to make orange, green, and purple without help, but if you don't, leave a comment and I'll help you out. =)

I wanted red on top of the cupcake, so I started with purple on the bottom and worked my way up. I used too much batter at the beginning and by the time I got to red, the batter was just about to the top of the muffin liner. I recommend about a Tablespoon of each color.

ONE GREAT TIP: TO SPREAD COLOR TO EDGE OF LINER, GET A CUP OF WARM WATER AND DIP A FINGER IN IT AND THEN SPREAD BATTER OUT TO THE EDGE. REDIP YOUR FINGER WITH EACH CUPCAKE AND EACH LAYER. I also spray my liners so the cupcake comes out easily.It's kind of time consuming, but these cupcakes are so fun and delicious, it's worth it.

See? I filled them way too full. The muffins grew into each other and the tops were trying to fall off when I took them out of the muffin pan. I think both orange and red were over the tops of the muffin liner. Still---delicious, moist, not too crumbly, and devoured.
See the pretty layers?
I was going to make some thick frosting, but decided against it when I saw how huge these were and remembered that it would be mostly kids eating them anyway and that I only had half a bag of powdered sugar! Opps. I dipped them when they were still warm too and lost a few muffin tops before I finally started frosting them. I kind of like the glazed taste.

The frosting/glaze was 1/2 cup butter, 4 1/2 cups powdered sugar, with 1/4 cup milk.
Like I said, they were delicious and they were devoured and they didn't leave crumbs all over or stain any kids.
This little guy liked his. They still ate the frosting first, but they all finished the whole cake part too. That's saying a lot for kids. Most just eat the frosting.
I made it in my bundt cake pan this week as well. It turned out great, but it had to cook for about 40 minutes to be done in the middle. When the edges were turning brown at about 20 minutes, I turned the oven down to 300 degrees to finish it off.

Here is what it looked like. I only used four colors instead of six this time too. I could probably do a double batch of batter (or two cake mixes) in my pan.
Still delicious. =)