Recipe #2: Red Velvet Cupcakes

Gluten-free, no less! So first of all, sorry about being horrible at updating! I've been super busy! I'm hoping to update a few times this week, to make up for last week!

Anyway, Carlee and I went to Sur La Table last Wednesday and took a baking class! There were 4 recipes available: waffles, blueberry muffins, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, and red velvet cupcakes. Well, there were 6 of us in the class, and we were each supposed to pick a recipe (and some had to share), so me and Carlee darted for the red velvet cupcakes, since they were the things we were most excited about!!!

Now, for the actual recipe:

The Cake:

1 3/4 cup canola oil

1 1/2 cup sugar

2 eggs, beaten (room temp)

1 cup brown rice flour

3/4 cup sorghum flour*

3/4 cup tapioca starch

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp xanthan gum

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk

1 tsp vanilla

1 oz red food coloring**

1 Tbsp cocoa

So first of all, preheat the oven to 350! Then mix the oil and sugar....or rather, cream it. This kind of took a while, and me and Carlee were convinced we ruined it. But trust, it will get creamed! Anyway, you then add one egg at a time, with the mixer still on.

Next (or beforehand) mix the dry ingredients (minus the cocoa). While the mixer is still going, you should pour 1/4 of the flour mixture, followed by 1/3 of the buttermilk, and so on (ending with the flour mixture!).

Then, you mix together the cocoa, red food coloring, and vanilla. TRUST, this is where the "red" part comes from....omg, it was all soooo red. Ok, so you mix that in with the rest.

For cake, you bake it for 25 mins, but apparently cupcakes take less time...but we aren't really sure how long, since the oven got turned off somehow. Oh well

The frosting:

1 box confectioner's sugar

8 oz. cream cheese

1 stick butter

1 cup chopped nuts (OPTIONAL!!)

1 tsp vanilla

Cream the first three ingredients, and then mix in the vanilla and chopped nuts (if you dare...we didn't).

Here is Carlee chopping the "optional" nuts...we chose not to include them on our cupcakes, because neither of us are too fond of walnuts or pecans, or whatever they were!

"Are they done yet?" Nope....because someone accidentally turned off the oven part way through! Haha, don't worry, they turned out OK!

YUM! Me putting frosting on...I'm trying to look serious, but I kept laughing.

Semi-finished products! They were soooo good!

Anyway, overall I really enjoyed the class!! They gave us wine, and cheese and crackers! How sweet! And, we got to try everything that was made, and take home leftovers if we wanted. In fact, I would love to take another class at Sur La Table. I think what I might do is buy a gift certificate for Ryan for Valentine's Day, so that we can take a class together at some point! How fun!!

So now for the big question....are these weight watcher friendly? umm, no not really, haha. I looked up info online about Sprinkles red velvet cupcakes, and based on that, they are 12 points. WELL, our cupcakes were definitely smaller, and had probably about 1/3 of the amount of frosting, so I went with 6 points (maybe it should have been 8, just to be safe). Whatever, I had my extra 35 points to start using, so no big deal!! I didn't even cheat =)

Lastly, I would like to apologize for the annoying spacing issues with this post. Maybe it's jus tthe browser I'm using, but I can't seem to get the "single space" function to work. Any thoughts on how this can be fixed? Ugh, it's super annoying!!

*you can also use something called "Jowar" which is found in Indian stores. Or, if you really can't find either of these, you can substitute it for rice or potato flour.

**by the way, in case you are like me and Carlee, and you look at the bottle of food coloring and say "Um, how do we measure 1 oz??" Well, it's the whole bottle. Yikes!