Red Velvet Cupcakes

Looking for the perfect red velvet cupcake, but a dairy-free version? Look no further!

I made this recipe from All in One Bake Shop (hat tip to Cookie Madness).  I used water instead of buttermilk. I added the food coloring to the water to get a sense of how intensely red the liquid needs to be to make the batter the right color. Based on this information, I think that next time I will use cranberry juice concentrate to tint the water instead of food coloring. (Update: here is someone who has successfully used cranberry juice concentrate to make red velvet)

In terms of the frosting, I swapped out Tofutti “cream cheese” for real cream cheese and margarine for the butter in the frosting (I made 1/3 of the whole recipe). The resulting frosting was a bit loose and kind of curdled. I ended up adding in some shortening plus a spoonful of meringue powder to pull the frosting together. I think I also added in more sugar. And it still was kind of broken looking. Probably I could have pulled it together by chilling and re-beating, or by heating over a water bath and re-beating, but I was kind of getting too impatient. I ended up making a cornstarch slurry and pouring the hot slurry into the beating frosting. Now THAT pulled the whole thing together into an ultra-light, fluffy, creamy frosting.

Here is another suggestion for a pareve cream cheese frosting. Shoshana’s recipe is basically what I ended up with after I made all my adjustments with Crisco, powdered sugar,  and meringue powder. I should have just started with her recipe to begin with!

Tags: cake, cupcakes, dairy-free, pareve, red velvet cupcakes