Marbled Cupcakes (for the Lakers)

June 8th, 2009 by justJENN

This marbled cupcake is special because the colors are gold and purple for the Lakers. Even if you aren’t a Laker fan you can still do this for your fave team with a quick color change. It’s a fun cupcakes and tastes great with Champagne Buttercream – the frosting of choice for all (hopeful) champions!

~makes 24 cupcakes~

ingredients:
3/4 cup (1-1/2 sticks) butter
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups cake flour
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of kosher salt
1 cup whole milk
gel food coloring

champagne buttercream (recipe here)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a cupcake pan with paper liners.

In a large bowl whisk together the cake flour, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time until combined, then add the vanilla. Alternate the flour mixture and the milk until combined.

Now set aside one cup of the batter, in a small bowl. Here’s where you add food coloring. I prefer gel because it doesn’t mess with the liquid in the batter. Now I picked up this ‘royal purple’ at the store, and it was BLUE. Unfortunate. So I used my skillz, and added some red to get just the right purple.

Now in your prepped liners, alternate the two batters by spoonful until you get to about 3/4 of the way full. To get the nice marbled look, take a knife, toothpick, chopstick – whatever you have and make figure 8s in the batter. You’ll be surprised how well this works.

Bake for 17-20 minutes until you get a clean toothpick. Let cool on a wire rack.

These are delicious as is, but go ahead and top them with some Champagne Buttercream for that perfect punch!