Red Velvet Cupcakes

I hope you all are having a fantastic weekend! We are! There is a group of us meeting tonight to throw a birthday party for a great friend of ours (Hoss). The Hubs and his friend, let's call him 'W', decided to throw a themed party. For any of you that know my husband knows that he isn't really into themes so I was compltetely shocked. We are throwing a 70's theme party and hopefully there will be more on that in another post.

Back to the project at hand-cupcakes! I didn't make these from scratch but as you will see a bit later I did jazz them up a bit. So bake your cupcakes according to the box.

Look at that amazing red color!!

 I use an ice cream scoop; it's a bit less messy and it is, for the most part, accurate in filling the cups to the right level.

Once they are done baking, let them cool completely. Trust me on the last one; you do not want to try to handle or frost a cupcake that is not COMPLETELY cool.

So to jazz up the cupcakes I bought one of those frosting kits from Wilton; it was only about $7.00. It comes with bags, a couple tips and directions for different fun ways to decorate.

I decided to pipe a little bit of frosting into the center of the cupcake before frosting the top.

Then instead of smearing the frosting on the top, like I usually do, I piped on the frosting with another tip. This tip is the larger "star" tip. It worked wonderfully.

Due to my excitement that my cupcakes look kind of professional and all freakin awesome, I forgot to take a pick of them all frosted. I'm sorry. :(

I also thought another touch of 'special' was called for so I grabbed a bar of semi-sweet chocolate and was going to put shavings on top of the frosted cupcakes. Now I must preface that I am not a professional baker and I do not possess the appropriate tools for accomplishing certain tasks in the kitchen but I thought I did rather well for working with what I have.

I grabbed a serrated peeler I had and a hunk of chocolate and just started shaving peeling over top the cupcakes.

I think they turned out AWESOME! I can't wait for the birthday dude to check these out. Hopefully he is as impressed as I am.

Have a wonderfully sweet weekend!