Red Velvet Cupcakes

To be honest with you, I have never tasted a red velvet cupcake. I know in some states that would be grounds for divorce. Ha. But if I have had a red velvet cupcake in the past, I've forgotten about it, so obviously the experience was not memorable enough. Like Kenny Powers says, I've had a lot of memories in my life, and sometimes the smaller ones get dumped to make room for the bigger ones.
I guess I would say, consider me full of regret for missing out on years of stuffing my piehole with these babies. I keep changing my mind about what flavor of cupcakes are my favorite, and this one is quite the contender. It has a flavor that is hard to explain. They're like half chocolate, half vanilla, and all deliciousness.

 

(The cupcake undressing so you could see the red cake underneath. Pervert.)

I was going to get around to making these later anyway, but I decided to make them for a friend who recently went vegan. When I asked what was the hardest thing for her to give up, she said that sometimes her workplace would bring in a steaming batch of red velvet cupcakes, and while most of the time non-vegan treats didn't do much for her, those cupcakes had her seriously considering a relapse. Well, no more, dear friend. We whipped these up and after our first ones apiece we had a conversation that went like this:

PBCC (Peanut Butter Chocolate Chocolate) Cupcakes

Okay, so I know it's been a few(ish) weeks. The thing is, I'm actually terrible at keeping up with blogs. But this is one I'm really passionate about, so I am going to try from now on to keep up with it a little bit better. My apologies.
Now the truth is that my last recipe was a bust: the lemon cupcakes with raspberry filling, that is. I was totally going to post an entry about them anyway, going over why they failed and what I am going to do differently next time. However, my roommate, who has been my photographer so far, deleted the pictures of the failurecakes, thinking I didn't want them (then having a good laugh at my expense over this exchange: "Why do you need the pictures? I thought you didn't like those cupcakes..." "Well, I still need to blog about them!"). And being the OCD creature that I am, I can't in good conscience write about a failurecake without having a picture of them to drive the point home. Rest assured, they were as ugly as they were messy: the raspberry filling looked like brain matter, poking through the watery lemon icing, refusing to be hidden. I will be retooling the recipe with more solid filling and fluffy (rather than drippy-ish) lemon icing, and when I do I will discuss the failurecakes in greater detail at that time.