Rainbow Cupcakes

A few months ago, I was tempted to make rainbow cupcakes. I used Wilton coloring with the result as the below picture.
I showed it to my friend and she said that the colors are not really attractive since it's too soft. I guess she actually meant my rainbow cupcakes look dull, hehehe. Well, Wilton's colors produce their best for pastel colors and there's no any other food colorings to find here in Jakarta, better than Wilton's product - I think.

I noticed that many of the American food bloggers are using Americolor product for food coloring. So, when Lynn told me that she's coming to visit me in July and asked me what I wanted from the States, the first thing that came up in my mind was those beautiful Americolor food colorings.

FYI, Lynn was a Singaporean blogger who is living in the States. I've known her for more than 4 years in the blogsphere but not until last year, when I finally met her in real person for the first time in Bali. We had a wonderful time traveling, shopping and eating together around Bali for 3 days.

Anyway, Lynn canceled her trip to Jakarta for the security reason (remember the Jakarta's bombing at those 5 stars hotels last July?), thus she sent me a parcel.

Well, the parcel already reached Jakarta 2 weeks ago but there's a problem to get it out from the Indonesian Customs office and also the Post office. I had to face many silly bureaucracy procedures. At last, I got the parcel out from the Post office yesterday *so relieved*

In the parcel, it contains the book "Eat, Pray, Love", 1 bottle of Omega 3 supplement, 1 set of gourmet writer plus extra 2 pens, and 12 bottles of Americolor. Yay!!! Thank you so much, dearie!
So... today, I couldn't wait to try out to make the rainbow cupcakes again and this time, I'm using the Americolor, yipeee!!!

Rainbow Double Vanilla Cupcakes from Lick The Bowl Good by Monica H

Ingredients:
1 ½ sticks (12 tbsp) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 ¾ cups of sugar
2 large eggs
2 Teaspoons of pure vanilla
1/2 Vanilla Bean, scraped (optional)
½ teaspoon of salt
2 ½ teaspoons of baking powder
2 ½ cups of flour
1 ¼ cups of milk

Directions:
- In a medium bowl, mix together salt, baking powder and flour. Stir to combine then set aside.
- Cream butter and sugar together in a large bowl, then add in eggs, one at a time. Add vanilla extract and the seeds of half a vanilla bean. Beat until well combined.
- Alternately add the dry ingredients and the milk to the butter/sugar mixture. Start with flour, end with flour.
- Divide the batter into 6 bowls. Color your batter with food coloring (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet).
- Spoon or pipe your batter in thin layers into the muffin cups, being careful not to mix the colors.
- Bake at 375 degrees for 18-20 minutes for 20 regular cupcakes.

The result *big grin*

Btw, I only got 16 mini cupcakes, not so sure why *blur*

All these cupcakes are dedicated to my dearest Lynn :)