Rainbow Cupcakes

Over the weekend Mia and I made the cutest Rainbow Cupcakes. The rainbow stripe effect comes from layering colored batter in white cupcake liners. Super easy, super cute and yummy to boot. Yes, I actually rhymed that last part.

I can see these as the perfect little girl's party dessert. Or even as a fun treat for a baby shower or other girly event.

Here's Mia just grinning ear to ear, excited with the idea of us baking cupcakes together. The ingredients are simple: White Cake Mix, food coloring (not pictured but I used McCormick's Neon colors), white cupcake liners, frosting (make your own or use Betty's version) and flower sprinkles. It's best to use a cake mix that uses egg whites. I'm told it helps minimize browning of the edges of the cake.

By the way, check out our newly remodeled kitchen. It's still incomplete (I'm still searching for glass cabinet knobs); but can you believe this entire kitchen used to be yellow oak with white tile countertops? Anyway, that's for another post, but just wanted to point the kitchen out cause I looove it!

Mia could not wait to get started. The kid was absolutely thrilled, I tell ya. Her Auntie Lichen sent her a homemade apron for her birthday and Mia was just giddy to get that thing on. Adorable, isn't it? Lichen is a dear college friend of mine. Super talented and creative. Check out some of her goodies (aprons, stationery, artwork) on her blog: http://www.blinkblots.blogspot.com/.

So we prepared the cake as directed on the box. We divided the batter into 6 separate bowls and then put different food coloring in each bowl. I suggest doing this a couple of drops at a time to get your desired hue. And every color is different. For example, we only needed 5 drops of the blue before the batter was the vivid blue we wanted. Yellow, on the other hand, was a different story. It took like half the bottle just to get the yellow to show up. I'm exaggerating. But you know what I mean.

We used forks for mixing. You don't have to. I read somewhere that forks would give more control when it comes time to drop the batter into the cupcake trays. I think we would have been fine using spoons. But ah well. The forks make pretty swirly patterns that Mia loved to watch.

Six colors: purple, blue, yellow, green, orange and pink. That's the order that I dropped them into the cupcake liners. Truth be told that layering the yellow and green next to each other probably wasn't a great idea since the colors blend way too well together. Obviously, you can do whatever color order you want.

We dropped each color one by one. Don't try to spread out the batter with your fork. Or spoon. Or finger. Don't even try. Doing so will only mix the up the colors. The batter will naturally spread itself out, so if you want to wait a couple of minutes before putting the next layer of batter, feel free. We, however, are of the impatient variety. We just plowed along layering colors with wild abandon.

Saved Mia's favorite color for last. Pink was our topper color. Mia's quite the girly girl.

We baked the cupcakes as directed and voila! Rainbow cupcakes! Notice ours has a bit of a swirly effect? Yeah, that's from the pouring of batter with wild abandon. But it looks cool regardless. You can't tell from this photo, but the cupcakes are still in their paper liners. the colors really show through quite well, don't you think?

Beautiful and scrumptious! It's a cool surprise! Most people see the cupcakes and think the colors are coming from the paper liners.

Mia exclaimed, "Mama look! The paper is rainbow too!" Indeed it is. Pretty, right?

We frosted ours with cream cheese icing. I'm a sucker for cream cheese frosting. A few flower sprinkles on top and we were done! Almost too pretty eat!