Red Velvet Cupcakes

With Valentine's Day coming up, I wanted to make something festive (and use some pink cupcake wrappers I've had sitting around).  Now I normally try to bake everything from scratch, but my mom had picked me up an adorable Red Velvet Cupcake Kit and I decided to use it (plus, I was in a bit of a hurry!).

Isn't it cute?  And it was so much simpler than baking from scratch... all you needed was 3 ingredients for the cake:  Oil, Water and 1 egg.

See?  Easy!

And boy was it RED!  The cupcakes took about 25 minutes to bake, so while they were in the oven I made the cream cheese frosting - which was super easy, the kit had a frosting pack and you just needed to add butter, milk and cream cheese.  It was a little thin (with a VERY strong cream cheese flavor), so I added some confectionary sugar to thicken it and make it a little sweeter.

Once the cakes had cooled, I got to decorating.  Nothing fancy - I just added some pink sanding sugar to the tops and that was it.  I would have liked to do more decorating, but as I said - I was in a hurry.

Overall, these were pretty good, especially coming from a mix.  But they were no match for homemade cupcakes.  Next time, I'd probably use a mix again if I was in a hurry, but I'd make the frosting from scratch.

Happy Valentine's Day!