The only thing better than a cupcake is a cupcake with a rich cream filling. So, when you start out with a cupcake that is well known for having a delicious frosting – such as red velvet, which is almost always paired iwth a cream cheese frosting – you know that it can only get better when you manage to incorporate more into the cupcake.
Red velvet cake is a buttermilk cake with a light cocoa flavor that gets its name from its color: red. The red in the cake comes from food coloring and the more you use the redder your cake will be. This recipe is adapted from a Cook’s Country recipe for a red velvet cake. They call for using 2 tablespoons of food coloring, which is an entire little bottle of the stuff. You can get away with using half that amount, but don’t skimp too much or you’ll lose a lot of color. If you leave out the food coloring completely, the cake will have a reddish brown tinge to it (thanks to the combination of cocoa powder and baking soda, this is where the idea of a red cake came from in the first place).
These cupcakes are moist and tender, with a distinct cocoa flavor to them. It isn’t enough to make them taste like a chocolate cupcake, but it is enough to give the cupcakes a good, solid flavor. I really like this about these cupcakes because it is too often that red velvet cupcakes don’t have much flavor at all and simply trade off their unique color. With the cream cheese filling (the same as the frosting), the cupcakes become even more moist. They will keep well for a couple of days in an airtight container.
If you’ve never made a cream-filled cupcake before, I have a filled cupcake tutorial that will guide you through the process. It involves removing a piece of cake from the center of the cupcake and adding filling. With this method, which only takes a few seconds per cupcake to do, you get a lot of filling in each. An alternative is to simply stick the tip of a pastry bag or a can of frosting into the cupcake and squeeze, but you don’t get nearly the same amount of filling and it doesn’t save very much time. You don’t need to do anything special to finish these off, but if you dye a little bit of frosting red, or have a red gel frosting pouch, you can add a little squiggle to the top that is reminiscent of the squiggle on the classic, cream-filled hostess cupcakes.
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