Explosive Red Velvet Cupcakes (the before image)

It doesn't always go right when I bake. I mean I have a pretty good idea when things are all going to pot, but this time I'm not even sure what I did wrong! But last night it certainly did....

My friend had asked me to make 20 red velvet cupcakes with white frosting for her son's birthday party. I used the recipe from Cake Days and doubled it. Hummingbird reckons the batch would result in 12-16 cupcakes so I make two batches together. Everything was fine until I added the cocoa powder/red colouring/vanilla to the mixture and it, uh, didnt mix.

You can't see in the above pic but there were specks of cocoa and red food colouring that didn't quite mix with the rest of it - you could really clearly see them in the mixture. I wasn't happy with it but thought I'd bung them into the oven to see if it would disperse when cooking and it may not be noticable. It was. See above. ;)

The little pockets of dye must have just exploded in the oven and resulted in a rather messy batch of cupcakes. I was really disappointed - mainly because I'd wasted 2x the ingredients for red velvet cupcakes and a good portion of my evening. I also discovered the old Kenwood Chef from the 50s might be great, but it's mix speeds of 'still' and 'fast' don't always cut it.

So I popped out to Tesco to buy more ingredients and started again. Tomorrow will see the finished products...