How to Make Choose-a-Frosting Cupcakes

-Hi, it's Miranda with recipe.com and today I'm gonna show you how to make choose-a-frosting cupcakes. Now, from one simple frosting recipe, we're gonna end up with 6 different flavor profiles. So we're gonna end up with vanilla, lemon, chocolate, raspberry, coffee, and maple. It's gonna be so, so simple. But to begin, let's get started with the cupcakes themselves. We're gonna start with 2 cups of all-purpose flour, 1 cup of milk, 1-1/4 cups of granulated sugar, 2 eggs, 2/3 cup of margarine or butter; you want it at least room temperature because we are going to be beating it together; then we need 1-1/2 teaspoons of baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and we also have 1 teaspoon of vanilla. So we're going to begin putting the baking powder and the salt all together and just giving it one little toss around And then we're gonna put that to the side. Next stop is our butter. So let's put our butter in this large mixing bowl here, and we are going to beat this together for like about 30 seconds to a minute until it's kinda beat and creamy. Luckily I started with room temperature butter since it can be really simple for me. Okay, so now let's add the sugar. Gradually, we're gonna add this in until it's all combined. And now my vanilla, clap that in there. Get that all mixed in, and then we're gonna add in the eggs just one at a time. And the next one. And don't forget, just while you're going to periodically scrape the sides of the bowl but you wanna make sure that your hand mixer is off when you do that, so looking beautiful and fluffy. These are gonna be some delicious vanilla cupcakes. Okay, now we are gonna alternate between adding in our flour mixture and our milk, back and forth, back and forth until it's all combined. When you're adding in a flour mixture to a liquid, you always wanna do it gradually so that the liquid has time to absorb the flour mixture. It doesn't get crumbly or overwhelmed, so it's a slow introduction. So we're just gonna keep alternating back and forth until this is all mixed in and perfectly combined. Okay. So we are all mixed together. Look how gorgeous and smooth this looks. It is time to spoon our mixture into our little cupcake tins. Now this is gonna make a total of 24 cupcakes. You can either grease yours or you can line them with little paper liners as I've done. So we're just going to spoon it in, always making sure you don't feel it to the tippy, tippy top. So maybe like, you know, halfway to 3/4 full. And then when we're done, we're gonna fill this all and then pop them in the oven at 350 degrees for about 20 to 25 minutes until we could insert a toothpick in the center, pull it out and it's nice and clean. So I'm gonna get back to filling in these little cups and we are gonna bake our cupcakes and come back when they're fresh out of the oven. So, our cupcakes are out of the oven. They cooked for about 20 minutes actually, and then we inserted a toothpick in the middle. They came out beautifully. They looked just gorgeous. We just have to [unk] here now. So what we're gonna start while they continue to cool is we're gonna begin making our frosting. So as we mention, we're gonna start with a butter cream frosting base, and then we will build on from there, six individual flavor profiles which I listed before. So I have our ingredients all laid out here. We have 4 cups of sifted powdered sugar. We have 1/2 cup of softened butter. I've left it out at room temperature because we're gonna clean the butter, so we want it to be easy to do. I don't wanna break our mixer. We have 1/2 cup of milk. We're gonna start with just a quarter of a cup and then add in more if necessary, and then we have 1 teaspoon of vanilla. So mixing that together is going to create our base. Now moving forward from there, the ingredients for our 6 flavors are as follows. We have multicolored nonpareils, 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice, a 1/4 teaspoon of finely shredded lemon peel, 1 drop of yellow food coloring, we have flaked coconut that we're gonna sprinkle on top so just a nice little bunch of that, then we have a quarter of a teaspoon of instant coffee crystals, 1/2 teaspoon of hot butter, chocolate sprinkles for sprinkling, then we have 1 tablespoon of unsweetened coco powder, we have colored chocolate sprinkles, a 1/4 teaspoon maple flavoring, chopped walnuts also for sprinkling, then we have ½ teaspoon of raspberry flavoring, 1 drop of red food coloring, and then multicolored coarse sugar. So to begin, we are going to cream our butter here in this nice big mixing bowl, and I'm going to use an electric mixer and just put this on medium. We are just gonna do this until softened because it's room temperature; that happened really easily. Now, add in the vanilla. Continue to mix until combined. And now, we're gonna alternate between adding sugar and milk in. So add in the sugar and then some milk, mix until combined and continue going into all the sugars and corporate it. If you find that it's a little bit too dry and you have more sugar than you do, moisture to soak it up, just continue adding a little bit of milk at a time. If you find that you have some powdered sugar on the side, which you most likely will, just stop your mixer, give it a nice good scrape so everything's incorporated and keep on mixing. Okay, so as you can see, I've divided our butter cream frosting base into these 6 cute little bowls and I have 6 of our cupcakes laid out here. Now, these frosting will be enough. Each flavor will frost 4 different cupcakes but just for demonstrating, I'm just gonna do one of each now. So let's get started with the first, which is vanilla. It's simple enough and we're actually now going to add anything to the base. All we'll be doing is just frosting. One of our cupcakes with the vanilla butter cream base. And then we're simply going to sprinkle some of our multicolored nonpareils on top. Look how adorable, classic, classic little cupcake. Very simple. That's one done and finished. This second one we're going to do is our lemon and I'll use a yellow bowl. Let's add in our lemon juice, our lemon peel or zest, and then the drop of food coloring. A key about food coloring, you can always just add in, you know, a tiny bit, like with the toothpick and to kind of dry it through to get the color, the desired color that you want and then just keep adding more, but this 1 drop worked out just perfectly. It's almost the exact color of this bowl. So now, we are going to frost this. How beautiful that yellow looks. And it's a big warm in here and so our frosting is a little bit drippy so if you're in a warm kitchen as well, you'll notice that happens, but if you pop them in the refrigerator, it will harden up [unk]. We're gonna sprinkle this one with coconuts. Beautiful, lemon and coconuts, super yum. Let's set this over here. Next up is our coffee flavor. So we're just going to dissolve this instant coffee grounds in this hot water, and just pour it on in. Give that a nice mix together. Let's frost this. Beautiful. We're gonna top it with chocolate sprinkles so you give this a nice a little sprinkling. Look how cute this looks. This one's to the side. Next up is our chocolate flavor. So grab our butter cream base and add in our coco powder. Now, if you find that it doesn't mix in smoothly, I think ours is gonna be just fine, but if you find that it doesn't, you can add in a little bit of milk if necessary. Okay. Yum, just personally one of my favorites, classic, delicious chocolate. It doesn't need anything else. Then a tiny little sprinkling of the colored chocolate sprinkles. How cute that looks. Gorgeous. Put that one to the side as well. Okay, the next up we have a yummy, yummy maple. So we're just going to add the maple flavoring right in here. Give it a nice stir and frost our cupcake, and of course, we'll [unk] with maple flavoring then walnuts. So sprinkle our walnuts on top and then finally, we're going to do our raspberry. So we're just going to add in the raspberry extracts, the food coloring, our red food coloring. And lets frost, perfect. And then this is where our multicolored coarse sugar comes in. And do that with yellow and pink and red. This just looks so pretty with that raspberry delicious icing. Look at the beautiful cupcakes that you've made. I know it was certainly a little bit extra work when it came to frosting all the ingredients, but look what you've made that is bound to be something here for everybody and it would really expand everyone's cupcake frosting horizons. So delicious, something for everyone here. That's how you make choose-a-frosting cupcakes. Thanks for watching, and for more great recipes and savings, visit us at recipe.com.