Tie Dye Birthday Cupcakes

Hello again, everyone!  It's Tuesday again, and as some of you know, my daughter's 4th birthday was this past Sunday, and her birthday celebration at school is tomorrow, so, I made up some surprise tie dye cupcakes that I think the kids are going to love!

These cupcakes are made using a white cake mix, because I just didn't feel like making a batter from scratch, and cake mixes come together so quickly!

Also, I used some special food coloring that I ordered from Amazon.com (you can find them here); as I have discussed on previous posts, not all food colors are good for baking.  Some are just for icing, and some are great for icing or baking.  These AmeriColor food colors are perfect for baking; they don't loose their vibrancy while baking, and they don't turn brown.

I chose to ice them with a plain white frosting, so that the kids would be really surprised when they bit into the cupcakes, and found the burst of color!

Here's your grocery list:
2 boxes of white cake mix

Ingredients for cake mixes

Frosting of choice (I chose 2 cans of plain white frosting)

Cupcake wrappers

Food coloring of choice

Quart size zip top bags

Since this is using boxed cake mixes, today's post is going to be more about a technique rather than a recipe.  

So, to start off with, the food colors that I ordered came in a pack of 6, and I wanted to use all 6, so I set out a quart sized zip top bag, 1 for each color, while the cake mix was coming together in the mixer.

 







Once I had all of my cake mix ready, I poured all of the batter into my large liquid measuring cup (before I poured the batter in, I zeroed out the weight of the measuring cup on my scale), and noted that the weight of the cake batter was 2 lb. 15 oz., which equaled 47 oz., divide that by 6 (since I wanted roughly the same amount of each color), and you come out to roughly 7.8 oz. per zip top bag. 
I did one cake mix at first, because I wasn't sure how much I would need, but it turns out that while I needed more than 1, I didn't need all of 2, but this made exactly 24 cupcakes for me, using about 1 and 1/2 cake mixes.
So, if you choose to use just 1 cake mix, you would need just under 1 cup of the batter per zip top bag; if you end up using 2 cake mixes, it would be just under 2 cups of batter per zip top bag. 

 




Now then, all of the batter has been dived up between the 6 zip top bags, I squeezed out about 1/4 tsp of the food color, in each bag.  I wanted a pretty vibrant color, and these colors are called, "electric pink, electric blue, electric yellow, etc", so I knew they were going to be bright!  Once I added the food coloring, I just squeezed the bags to mix it all together. 

 

 
Put the cupcake liners in the cupcake pan, and snip the tip of one bag (you'll want to have a plate on hand, to set the bags on, once the corner has been cut off...).  You can see I cut a good sized amount of the corner off of the yellow zip top bag; I shouldn't have cut off that much.  It let out too much batter, an instead of having streaks of yellow, it let out enough to have almost a full layer of yellow.  It wasn't a big deal, just something to take note of.  Unless you're after that look, in which case, go for it! 

 




With the corners cut off of the zip top bags, drizzle a little bit in each cupcake liner; you don't want it to completely cover the previous color, or else it will bake up as a solid layer of color, instead of as a swirl.  I also wouldn't recommend swirling them with a toothpick, as you might run the risk of having the colors get muddy.  I don't know if that would happen, but I didn't want to risk it. 

 

 
I had to take a picture of this cute one....I accidentally made a pumpkin face!  I couldn't do that again if I tried!  

So, anyway, according to my cake mix, I was supposed to bake these cupcakes for 14-19 minutes, at 350*.  The first batch I used more yellows and oranges, and on my second batch, I used more pinks and purples, so you can see the difference.   

 
Personally, I love the pink and purple ones!  So pretty!   However, I think the boys in her class will probably enjoy the ones with more yellow and orange, so to each their own!  

So, here is the cupcake all frosted up.  It looks like any other normal cupcake, pretty, tasty, basic.  Until you open it up, then it's a party!!