One of my earliest memories of my summer vacations spent at my grandmom’s house : Colourful Cake! We used to be welcomed with these colourful bites of goodness. Moist, bright, not too sweet and just so playful! As kids, we just wanted to wolf down a million slices of the cake or at least keep looking at it and playing with it. Just so pretty!!!
I still remember reaching the house in Patna and heading straight for the kitchen. After hugging everyone (including the dogs) 🙂 And there was this box. The cake box. It always had slices of this cake, and we would just be so thrilled to have home made cake that we would devour it all in no time.
My aunt gave me the recipe around ten years ago, but I seem to have misplaced it. Makes me really sad that I don’t have the exact recipe my grandmom used to make. But this is my version of replicating it. Sometimes I make this as cupcakes, sometimes as cake. It is such a fun recipe and there is so much to play around with. I encourage everyone to make this. Bring out your inner child, your inner artist and just have fun 🙂
The base vanilla cake can be made just as is, in case you aren’t feeling particularly colourful that day. But trust me, it’s infinitely better with the colour. Instant happiness for you and everyone you share this with!
The recipe is super easy, just make sure that the batter isn’t overmixed once the flour is added. Overmixing will make the cake dense and tough, because of the all gluten that gets activated. Make sure all the ingredients are at room temperature so that they all bind together well.
I use liquid food colour, you could use gel too. Make sure that you add a little more colour than what you want it look like, since colour becomes lighter while baking. You can layer it systematically and neatly or just plop all the colours in different spots and get a marbled effect. Whatever works for you 🙂
Colourful Vanilla Muffins
Ingredients
100g butter
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 cup milk
1.5 cup all purpose flour – measured correctly (spoon into the cup and then level off to get the right measurement)
1.5 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Few drops of your favourite food colours
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 175C and grease the cupcake mould. You can also just use liners instead of greasing the mould.
- Get the butter and sugar into a mixing bowl. Using an electric/stand mixer, whisk them together till they are pale and fluffy. This will take about 3-5 minutes.
- Add the eggs, vanilla essence and mix till incorporated fully.
- Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
- Gently mix in the flour and milk, alternating between the two. Start and end with the flour (flour-milk-flour-milk-flour)
- Fold in gently and make sure not to overmix. Divide the batter into four bowls. Leave one as is and add a few drops of colour in the others and mix well. I love yellows, pinks, blues and greens for this kind of muffin.
- Pour the batters into the moulds, 1/2 way full. You can either add the colours in layers, or just adhoc as you wish. If you are going the ‘as you wish’route, run a toothpick through the batter to marble it, once all the colours are added.
- Bake for 20 mins, until the muffin springs back to touch.
- Cool on the wire rack/in the liners and then enjoy! 🙂
My Tuck Box 
Looks yummy
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