A cupcake valentine

There’s this day this week that just happens to be February 14.

That’s nice: how about some cupcakes?

This is another modified version of something from that oh-so-wonderful book of cupcake recipes. I modified the recipe for the basic vanilla cupcakes to use water instead of milk. And I used cold coffee instead of milk for the vanilla buttercream icing.

I also put a small amount of red pigment gel food colouring into both the cupcake batter and the icing. That’s right: pink batter and pink icing. Most excellent.

I find it best to add the food colour at the same time as liquid ingredients for the batter – and with the margarine for the icing.

The cupcakes looked like this before I put the icing on:

I used my icing gun – with a large, round tip – to put the icing onto the cupcakes once they were cool.

I decided to make a spiral of icing onto the top of each cupcake. And, then, I free-handed hearts – some big, some small – in icing on top of the spirals.

Like this:

Use cinnamon heart candy to decorate some of the cupcakes.

Like this:

Or this:

I got the cinnamon hearts at a bulk food store. I got the red pigment gel food colouring at a bulk food store as well. If you don’t like cinnamon hearts, or want to use another kind of decoration, those candy hearts with messages might look good – and so might pretty much any other kind of candy, chocolate, or sprinkle.

Happy February 14.