Purple Passion

For Valentine's Day, I wanted to make my valentines some heart shaped, Red Velvet cakes. After finding what looked like an excellent Red Velvet recipe online, I baked it only to find it to be extremely oily, even after leaving it in the oven for a few extra minutes, past the necessary baking time. Nothing would take the greasiness away.

I went back to the drawing board and decided to re-make them, with the idea to lower the level of vegetable oil or possibly using butter instead of oil with this new batch. There was only one problem, I was now out of red food colouring.

I did not want to go out again to get more ingredients, so I thought that if I could not make RED velvet, I would, instead, use the next best colour that I had available to me in my cupboard.

...HELLO PURPLE!

Still not thrilled with the amount of oil and/or possible amount of butter, I decided to change up the recipe completely. I started thinking that the only thing that really makes the red velvet any different than a chocolate cake was the addition of red food colouring and extra oil. Ugh. There's the grease again. All "velvet" means in this recipe is clogged arteries. So, I decided to make a simple vanilla cake recipe and add two teaspoons of purple food colouring.

I decided to call them "Purple Passion"! ...Move over Red Velvet, Purple Passion is the new cupcake in town!

Why haven't I thought to do this with cupcakes or cakes or even cookies before? Kids would LOVE these. We add colour to icing, but why don't we add colour to doughs - imagine pink or red coloured, heart shaped sugar cookies? Robin's egg blue cupcakes for spring time? The possibilities are endless. And delicious.

I love this idea. Don't you? You are welcome to use it, if you promise to let me know and/or share!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Love,

Lynda

PS I forgot to mention that I made cream cheese frosting...I will have to post how to make it another day! It's AMAZING.