Colour Me Cupcake!

There's nothing like a bit of colour to cheer you up on an autumn day.. inside and out!

These fabulously coloured cupcakes have multi-coloured icing and multi coloured sponge!

It was interesting to see how when the cupcake rose in the oven it pulled some of the colour up too. Try experimenting with all different colours: for Halloween I think I'm going to attempt a black and orange striped cupcake with decoration that I'll reveal in a few weeks time!

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To colour the inside of the cupcake, first divide your batter into four separate bowls. In each bowl at a different colour food colouring and mix well. Then layer each colour smoothly into the cupcake cases, one colour on top of the other. Try and keep similar colours away from each other, i.e. blue and green as depending on the shade they may blend. Break it up with an orange on pink!

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I layered the cupcakes blue, then pink, then green, then purple.

The bottom row in the picture shows fully layered cupcakes. In the top row: the blue case has one layer, the pink cupcase has pink over blue, and the green cupcake has blue, then pink, then green- then just purple to add on top!

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To make the multicoloured icing, first divide your plain buttercream icing into four bowls. Similarly to the batter, add different colour food gels to each bowls. Then layer each colour in your piping bag.

NOTE: Even when not piping multi-colours, always pipe a little out first on a plate just to get any air bubbles out and to avoid is splattering. It is important to do this with multi coloured icing as otherwise your first cupcake will be all one colour.

See the picture below for the first three pipes of the piping bag to notice how the colour change occurs:

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The final product:

To decorate add multi-coloured sugar strands, or even white sugar strands to set off against the rainbow of colours!