Red velvet, if you please

As I've mentioned previously, I'm a "cake mix and pre-made frosting" kinda gal. I've always aspired to make cupcakes from scratch, but was intimidated by the sheer number of ingredients, effort and increased potential for disaster. Last night, however, I threw caution to the wind and decided to not only make cupcakes from scratch, but red velvet cupcakes AND cream cheese frosting from scratch. Go ahead and "ooooh" and "aaaah." I'll wait. Done?

I got the cupcake recipe from a friend, who happened to get it from AllRecipes.com, and found a frosting recipe online. In hindsight I realized that I probably could have gotten both from Hil's baking blog, but it was too late. Next time, Hil, I promise!

As I started to cream together the butter and sugar for the batter using my handmixer, I realized that I hadn't softened the butter enough and that even the lowest setting on my handmixer was to quick, resulting in clumps of butter and sugar flying out of the mixing bowl, onto me and the counter. Oops. A box mix was still within reach, but I couldn't let myself give up yet. I continued. I added the cocoa powder and red food coloring to the batter, thinking that the food coloring wasn't going to be red enough. Wrong! It was quite red.

I reached the portion of the recipe where I was supposed to mix the baking soda and vinegar together first before adding it to the batter, but must have gotten sidetracked by the memories of childhood volcano experiments and ended up adding those ingredients directly to the batter. Oops.

When it came time to scoop the batter into the cupcake wrappers, that's when things got really out of control. I poured the batter into my large measuring cup to make it easier to pour into wrappers. All this transferring of bright red batter turned my kitchen into a murder scene. On my counter, on my floor, on my stove, on me... Oops. (Does William Sonoma sell crime scene tape?)

The recipe didn't have a cooking time for cupcakes (it's designed for cakes), so I had to guesstimate. And I made regular-size cupcakes, along with some jumbo ones, so my guesstimating was pretty tricky. They came out just a little bit crispy on the top, but not bad at all. With the yummy cream cheese frosting and fun, heart sprinkles, my experiment was complete.

Cooking from scratch wasn't as difficult as I'd imagined. I'm not quite ready to stake a claim at the top of Scratch Mountain, but I'm certainly not waving a white flag of surrender...yet.

"I got the idea in a dream. I was back in cooking school, and I was late for my final, so I run over to an oven and I open it up and sitting there is the s'mores wedding cake. And I present it to my teacher, and he starts weeping, and the whole class starts applauding and cheering. And then, of course, Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise come leaping out of the cake screaming about how amazing it is, so that made the whole thing a little creepy, but up until then..." - Sookie, Gilmore Girls