Today is your lucky day! Well, I thought that since it's birthday month for both myself and 
RAINBOW Vanilla Unicorn Poop Cupcakes
The 1st recipe is my now infamous vanilla unicorn poop cupcakes which I have now upgraded to include RAINBOW frosting. I am warning you now, wear gloves, or a least, make sure you don't have to go anywhere where multicoloured fingers and other appendages are a problem, at least for a few days.
The trick is really... don't complicate things. You only need one piping bag for this and you really can make quite a mess and still achieve an incredible result. So put that OCD to rest.
Easy Rainbow Frosting Swirl Technique for Cupcakes! - A Cupcake Addiction How To Tutorial
I found this YouTube video SUPER helpful and it was far less complicated than the millions of colour sausages everyone else was trying to explode my brain with. Also, stick to three colours: yellow, red and blue. Just like the lady says, because they will naturally mix and blend as you're piping, giving you all the other colours in-between, like green, purple and orange :)
For a refresher ( and because in my last post, I left out the eggs, and in the one before that, I left out the flour 🙈, which of course I only realised when I tried to follow my own recipe). So, here's my vanilla cupcake and icing recipe:
Tools:
2 x muffin/ cupcake trays (2 x12's = 24)
24 Cupcake holders/ baking liners
2 large mixing bowls
An electronic hand mixer
A wooden spoon
A sieve
3 bowls for preparing your different coloured icings and a separate teaspoon for each.
A measuring jug or cup
The cupcakes:
This recipe makes 24 cupcakes.***
**Cupcake Ingredients: **(American cups)
2 cups of sugar
2 large eggs
2.5 cups of cake four
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
240ml milk
120ml sunflower oil
1 tablespoon vanilla extract/ vanilla essence
1 cup of water
**Icing Ingredients: **
500g butter - must be soft/ room temperature
500g icing sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla essence
1 teaspoon each of blue, red and yellow food colouring
Recipe Hint: food colouring hint: the cheaper liquid was good for this recipe because we wanted to achieve pink and not red. We were going for pastel colours, rather than bright colours. If you want your icing to come out a proper red, I recommend you use food colouring gel instead.
Recipe Hint: use the voices of your ancestors to guide you as to how much vanilla you want. I usually err on the side of generosity BUT DON'T go and use the whole bottle though. It doesn't taste very nice if you drink it directly from the bottle so it won't taste nice if you throw the whole thing into your icing either🤣).
**Method: **
Preheat the oven to 180deg Celcius.
Method Hint: Spray your trays with spray and cook. This will help the holders stay in place and IF your cupcakes rise to much, it will mean spillovers or muffin tops won't stick and they'll still come out.
Line the baking trays with your cupcake holders/ liners. Quality does count though. This time around, we used very high-quality cupcake holders, and they were quite tall too, so there was no spillage over the sides.
Combine the milk, oil, eggs and vanilla extract in a bowl and cream together.
In a separate bowl, sift together the four, sugar, baking powder, and salt.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix well, slowly adding the water until well combined. Never overmix. This will cause your cake to flop/ not rise. The batter for this recipe will be surprisingly thin. This is a GOOD thing and an indication of how light and fluffy your cupcakes will be.
Fill your cupcake holders, evenly distributing batter. There should be enough to fill the cups to about 2/3, leaving space for the cupcakes to rise.
Place in the oven for roughly 20 minutes, or until you can gently put a toothpick all the way through and have it come out clean.
Once done, you can leave them to cool partially in the baking trays, and then remove them onto cooling racks.
While those are cooling off, you can prepare your icing.
Decorating hint: I love going to the baking shop and buying sprinkles of all sorts in bulk, because it means, when inspiration strikes, i can whip out my box of glitter and sparkles and be ready for anything from Christmas biscuits to octopus cakes to rainbow pride cupcakes. Having a well-stocked baking cupboard is so incredibly helpful. I like knowing I can just whip up a miracle ata moment'ss notice! Very important when you have three ravenous preeteens/ teenagers in the house!
Icing Method:
Add the icing sugar, vanilla essence and butter into a bowl and beat on high until completely creamed and smooth. I added a splash of milk tart liquer to the icing because we'd run out of milk. lol.
Divide your icing into three separate bowls, adding 1 teaspoon of blue food colouring for the blue icing, 1 teaspoon of red colouring for the pink icing and a teaspoon of yellow icing to the third bowl. Adding too much of the liquid colouring to your icing will make your icing runny and messy and impossible to pipe or mould. I did use a piping bag, but alas, I still cannot find the nozzles that fit. The effect was still great though.
Spoon the colours in separately like the lady says in the video above, and bippityboppityboo you have rainbow icing! Do a test pipe onto a plate to make sure all the colours are coming out properly and then pipe away!
You can then finish them off by adding glitter and sprinkles to your hearts desire.
BONUS RECIPE: Nut Free Lemon Zesty Carrot Cupcakes
This Recipe does contain coconut!
**Tools: **
Electric mixer
A large mixing bowl
A chopping board
A knife for chopping
A grater
A wooden Spoon
Cupcake holders
Spray and Cook
Baking tins: cupcake trays (12's)
Preheat the oven to 180deg celcius and get busy prepping your baking trays.
Baking Hint: You will need to spray them very thoroughly as this is an extremely high sugar content batter and it WILL stick if you don't. DO NOT use butter or oil or margarine. These will just leave you eating the carrot cake out of the tin (which I have totally done). You then need to line the tins with cupcake-baking holders. Once your lining is in place, give everything another good spray, just in case.
Cupcake Ingredients:
Cake Flour: x 2 cups
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons of bicarb
2 cups of sugar
1 1/2 cups of oil (sunflower works great)
4 eggs lightly beaten
2 1/2 cups of carrots (grated)
1 tin crushed pineapple (lightly drained)
1 1/2 cups desiccated coconut
This recipe is so easy you can literally throw everything into a large mixing bowl and stir with your wooden spoon. You don't need an electric beater. You will need to work those arm muscles though to make sure everything combines. Once well mixed, you can spoon the mixture into your baking trays.
Baking times for Cupcakes: approximately 35 minutes
Be sure to place your trays as centred as possible in the oven and not too close to the bottom or top. The high sugar content will also cause it to burn easily.
Once your baking time is up, remove from the oven and check to see if your cupcakes are done by gently sliding a skewer/ toothpick into a few of them. If it comes out clean, they're done. If there is batter stuck to the skewer, they must go back in.
When your cupcakes are done place them in the tins, on a cooling rack for at least an hour before flipping them over and out - gently - onto another cooling rack.
While you wait for these to cool off enough to ice, you can prepare the icing. Remember to never ice warm cake. It will melt and ruin your icing.
Icing Ingredients:
200g butter
400g icing sugar
250g cream cheese
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
a teaspoon each of Red and Yellow food colouring
1 teaspoon of grated lemon zest
1 table spoon of lemon juice
Method:
Once again, you can just throw these all into a mixing bowl all together and mix! This time you'll need that electric mixer to get the light and fluffy texture you need.
When you are ready, you can spoon or pipe the icing onto your cake and then sprinkle with glitter or other sprinkles for decoration.
