Rainbows take the cake!

It's true what they say about rainbows, they're pretty anywhere! I've been planning on making these cupcakes for quite a while and after submitting my term paper on Strategic Management, which I slaved over and managed to write into 84 pages, I finally found the time! These rainbow cupcakes only made things a whole lot better when I received a 3.75 grade point average for my Strategic Management course. Celebrate? 

This is pretty fun to make with kids- your children- or with your younger siblings, like I did with my baby brother. Or if you're making it alone, it absolutely makes you feel giddy! Or at least that's what happened with me. And it's pretty easy too!

Rainbow Cupcakes

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

3 tspn. baking powder

1/2 tspn. salt

1 1/2 cups sugar

3/4 cup or 1 1/2 sticks of butter at room temperature

2 large eggs at room temperature

2 egg whites at room temperature

2 tspn. vanilla extract

1 cup milk

food coloring (I used red, yellow, green, blue and purple)

any garnish you like

Procedure:

Preheat oven to 350F and line muffin pan with paper liners. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

In another bowl, beat together sugar and butter using an electric mixer until well-combined, around 2-3 minutes. Put the mixer on low then add eggs and egg whites one at a time. Add vanilla.

Gradually add flour mixture in 3 additions, alternating with milk in 2 additions, ending with the flour mixture. Divide the batter into number of available food color (For mine it was 5). Add food coloring per bowl (the lightness/darkness of the color is up to you) and mix to combine.

Add batter into each cupcake liner color by color, around 1/2 to 1 tablespoon each color. Start with violet and end with red for a perfect rainbow. Don't worry about the colors mixing up when you add them on top of each other. All the colors together should fill the cupcake liner around 2/3 full.

Bake around 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick/tester inserted into the cupcake comes out clean. If you don't want to poke holes into your cupcakes, you can touch the top of the cupcake and if it springs back, then it's ready.

Of course poking holes don't matter if you're planning on putting frosting atop your cupcakes. These cupcakes taste pretty good without frosting, and they're really cute to eat- almost too cute in fact. But we can take it a step further.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients:

1 8oz. bar cream cheese

3 tbsp. softened butter

1 cup sifted powdered sugar

1/8 tspn. cinnamon powder

Procedure:

Pour ingredients into the electric mixer's bowl and beat until light and fluffy.