Rainbow Cupcakes for Mardi Gras

I have not made cupcakes for some time, and had been longing to do so.  After a quick Internet search, I thought it would be super fun to try my hand at making some rainbow cupcakes to coincide with the Sydney Mardi Gras parade, which takes place this evening.  I chose this recipe from All Recipes because it very handily gave the colour proportions for the cake batter so that I did not have to do it by trial and error. The frosting is my favourite Primrose Bakery Vanilla Buttercream.

 Here are the pots of coloured batter, ready to go into the cupcake pans:

This is what the cakes looked like fresh out of the oven:

And here they are looking pretty after being iced to hide the surprise inside:

But peel off the wrapper, and the rainbow is revealed:

To make 12 of these cupcakes, you will need:

125g sugar
125g butter
2 eggs
125g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons milk
Liquid food colouring in red, blue, green and yellow

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius, and line a 12 cup cupcake tray with cupcake wrappers.

Put the butter and sugar into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and beat together until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs to the bowl, one at a time with a small amount of flour, and beat in until well combined.

Add the vanilla extract and beat in.  Next, alternately beat in the remaining flour and the milk in three tranches, starting and ending with flour, until just combined (but do not overmix or your cakes will be tough).

Evenly divide the batter into six bowls.  Colour the bowls of batter with the liquid food colouring, using the cap of the liquid colouring bottles as a measure, as follows:

Bowl 1 - 1/2 cap red
Bowl 2 - 1/2 cap red and 1/2 cap yellow
Bowl 3 - 1/2 cap yellow
Bowl 4 - 1/2 cap green
Bowl 5 - 1/2 cap blue
Bowl 6 - 1/2 cap blue and 1/2 cap red

Evenly divide the purple batter between the 12 cupcake liners, spreading the batter to the edge of the cupcake wrapper with a skewer or small palette knife (this ensures that you will see the colour when the cupcake is unwrapped).  Repeat with the remaining batter in the order of blue, green, yellow, orange and red to replicate the colours of the rainbow.

Place the cupcakes in the preheated  oven and bake for 10-15 minutes or until cooked through when tested with a skewer.

You can leave the cupcakes uniced or make your favourite frosting and decorate as desired. For my cupcakes, I made a half recipe of the Primrose Bakery Buttercream referred to above, and piped on the icing using a star tip, starting from the centre of the cakes.