Red Velvet Cupcakes / Pink Ribbon Day / Hummingbird vs Kate

It was Pink Ribbon Day on Monday and on the weekend I was feeling motivated enough to make cake to celebrate the birthday of Penny bear (my Pink Ribbon bear). My friend Helen is doing Baketober so I thought I should participate too. Since I had two pairs of hands (Miss B was in town) it seemed like the perfect opportunity to make a cupcake from the Hummingbird Book, and compare to a real Hummingbird cake. Miss B said red velvet is her favourite so that’s what I went with. It was SO hard for me to follow a recipe precisely but in I managed to measure ingredients to the gram (and include the whole quantity of sugar stated) and monitor my timings with herculean effort.



I have an interesting relationship with red velvet cake – I never know whether I like it or not. Its not quite chocolate but has cocoa, it uses a whole tube of food colouring per 12 cupcakes, and a has a cream cheese frosting which always seems to me to be a bit sweet. But nonetheless Miss B loves it so this was the one I tried. I used a half recipe (luckily!) and the wrappers were ones I had leftover from Diamond Jubilee season, purchased on a whim from Waitrose (choice of wrappers does matter in terms of size / shape / thickness!)

Key noteworthy things: 20mL of food colouring is needed for 12 cupcakes; buttermilk can be substituted with normal milk mixed with lemon juice (just under 1C milk: 1 tbsp lemon juice); cream the butter and sugar for at least 5 minutes in the mixer for a super light and fluffy mix; and do not fill each case more than 2/3 full. I was really happy with the height of the cupcakes when they came out of the oven.

Verdict: Miss L and Miss B indicated they liked my version better but they might have been biased. Mr T did a blind tasting and also liked my version better! In all cases they said that the cake wasn’t as dense as the real Hummingbird cake which was a good thing. Hmm...

The colour was the pretty close to the real Hummingbird cake though mine were still more brown than red. There is a whole lot less frosting on there too – whilst I like frosting I don’t think it needs to be a 3:5 proportion (though I guess I’m weird in this respect if bestselling cakes have piles of frosting!)



The frosting was a bit too sweet for my liking so I had to break the rules at the last minute and throw in some lemon juice to counter it. Obviously this made it less stiff so I didn’t swirl it Hummingbird style. It also wasn’t quite as cream cheesey as I liked so I added some additional cheese. The overall cake is smaller – the book recommends using 2” deep tins but I only had shallow cake tins.

Finally, it was Penny’s birthday so I had to go pink! I was a bit too heavy handed with the red food colouring so threw some white frosting back in and ended up with an unexpected swirl effect.

Also, ballerina bear Penny also got some home stitched shoes for her birthday from Mr T, complete with pink ribbons which match the rest of her outfit. Happy Pink Ribbon day everyone!