Rainbow Cupcake Fail (Well Sorta)
One of the things I enjoy most about baking is getting to be creative with flavor combinations and the appearance. When it comes to kid’s birthdays I love getting to work with the child and watch their visions come alive. They have the most creative flavor combinations and appearance requests. These past few weeks I have been working with a 3 year old who requested Rainbow Cupcakes. She wanted it to be colorful and picked a vanilla cupcake, rainbow unicorn marshmallow center, and vanilla frosting. This seemed totally possible and I was excited to make it a rainbow surprise. The plan was to use my dye free food coloring and have two different colors layered together, a yellow marshmallow dye free sprinkle center, and then white frosting with rainbow sprinkles. I wanted to do it this way because I thought it would be a fun surprise when they took off the cupcake wrapper and bit into the cupcake (or lets be honest licked the frosting off the top of the cupcake).
However, this didn’t go as planned! I started by splitting my basic vanilla cake batter into two separate bowls and added Dye Free red food coloring to make pink in one and then my blue food coloring into the other (this ended up turning green I'm assuming because the batter was yellow already). This was my first failure because I wanted blue and it went green but I knew they would still look cute so I went with it. I used cookie scoops instead of my typical ice cream scoop. I thought this would help in being able to keep small layers without overfilling the cupcake liners. I spent 30 minutes layering my pink and green batter. I alternated the color pattern to make sure I would have enough of each color for the 48 cupcakes I was making. The cupcake batter looked so pretty layered together and I put them in the oven so excited for them to be done so I could cut into my tester cupcake and see the layers. But when I opened the oven to get out my cupcakes I was met with colorless vanilla cupcakes! I was so confused that I did a double take hoping I had imagined it.
After doing research on google while my cupcakes cooled I learned that natural food coloring can lose its color if the heat is above 275 degrees and since I bake cupcakes at 350 degrees it was past that point. This was my first time ever using dye free food coloring in batter so it wasn’t something I would have ever considered happening! Sometimes with baking you have trial and error but since this was just food coloring added in I didn’t even consider that being a possibility. If I had known this to be a possibility I would have done a trial run to see the outcome instead of making the cupcakes the day of the party! Typically I don’t do all the baking in one day but I have a full time job and my week was jammed packed so baking day of was my only option.
When I realized what had happened I knew I had to go back to the drawing board. The first thing I did was call the Mom of the 3 year old to let her know what had happened. Thankfully this was a close friend and while we had an idea of what the 3 year old wanted my execution was left up to me and was flexible. So I went back to the drawing board and changed my original plan. I added a pink rainbow unicorn marshmallow center instead and instead of doing plain white frosting I split the frosting into 4 separate bowls and added different dye free food coloring to each one. I made them pastel colors of pink, blue, green, and purple to match the color theme. While this wasn’t the original plan the cupcakes turned out really cute and both Mom along with the 3 year old were happy with the outcome. The cupcakes still tasted delicious and the appearance was fun and allowed the kids at the party to pick out their favorite color. Sometimes our failures can still turn into a success if we take a different approach and are willing to go back to the drawing board.
Does this mean that I am done baking with dye free food coloring? No, my plan is to keep experimenting and find a way to make this happen. So stay tuned for a blog where I get to celebrate the future success of colorful cupcake batter with you! To see the whole process of making these cupcakes make sure to check out the video I have posted below.
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