Red Velvet Cupcakes-Cupcakes for a Cure

The official beginning of the Relay for Life year started September 1st, and I had such good intentions to send cupcakes to work with my mom once a month starting then.  However, as always September through December is a crazy busy time of year with the holidays and Grant's birthday and I never ended up getting around to it. 
So I figured I only have 4 months from now until the end of the school year to raise money with cupcakes and I better get started.  Naturally with Valentine's Day this week I thought red velvet would be the perfect flavor, plus I have never made red velvet and have been wanting to for awhile now.

I used the red velvet recipe from the girls of Georgetown Cupcakes except I didn't use red food coloring, I used the Red Velvet Emulsion I also used for the Red Velvet cut out cookies.  Since the recipe was from Georgetown Cupcakes I thought I would be blown away with a really great flavor but I have to say I was a little disappointed.  There wasn't enough of a chocolate flavor to satisfy me.  The recipe calls for 2 1/2T cocoa and I have to say next time I will be using 1/4c to add more flavor.  Most of the recipes from Katherine and Sophie say they will make 12 cupcakes and I always somehow end up with 18, I thought this would be the same for their red velvet recipe so I only added 1 1/2T red velvet emulsion.  This recipe ended up making 24 cupcakes so I really should have added 2T of the emulsion and I plan to next time I make them.

All this being said, my husband said they tasted good and they were really moist right out of the oven.  They rose perfectly and other than wanting a little deeper red color and a little extra cocoa flavor they seemed perfect.

Cherry Cupcakes

My Mom's birthday was this week and she requested cherry cupcakes.  I've never made them before so I was a little hesitant.  I have has some bad experiences with attempting recipes I've never made before and them turning out really badly.  I got the recipe from the girls of Georgetown Cupcake.  Their book has a few recipes and this one is Cherry Blossom.

 

The only alterations to their recipes I make is to decrease the sugar content, so the tops of the cupcakes are not sticky.  I also added about 1/2 a vial of cherry Lorann's flavoring.  When I tasted the batter before adding the flavoring I couldn't get any cherry flavor unless I bit into a cherry.  I decided that wasn't good enough and I didn't want to search for flavors in a cake.  Adding the Lorann put it over the top yummy!

Strawberry Cupcakes

I made strawberry cupcakes for my nieces birthday and they were adorable.

I searched all over for a good strawberry cake recipe.  I found this one from Martha Stewart and made it for my sister's birthday a couple days before.  I was not satisfied with the flavor because you couldn't taste the strawberry.  I actually had my husband taste it without telling him what flavor it was and he couldn't figure it out.  So when I made them for Sophie's birthday I bought some lorann's strawberry flavoring and used about 1/2 the bottle.  It turned out perfect!  I used store bought cream cheese frosting because I had issues with frosting curdling (stupid Ohio weather), and they were so girly and cute, Sophie loved them.