Adventures in . . . Bleeding Heart Cupcakes

I just can't believe how fantastically disgusting these look, and how they manage to look even grosser on camera than in person. This is a particularly bloody looking one because as the frosting melted in the course of painstakingly frosting tiny nerves on two dozen cupcakes, the dye started to separate from the frosting. My vein-frosting skills were improving by such unexpected margins that I decided to appreciate the increasingly bloody veins rather than pause and refrigerate the frosting.

This recipe comes from Clare Crespo's book Hey There, Cupcake! , which I don't own, but I found this particular recipe on Epicurious. It was a fun recipe to make, and I might make veiny cupcakes once again, but probably not with this recipe. It is just a vanilla cupcake with vanilla frosting, and then you drop a little bit of strawberry jam into the cupcake to make "blood." So actually making the cakes was pretty easy, but the assembly was a bitch: removing little plugs from each cupcake, dropping in a little 1/2 t of strawberry jam, plugging them back up, frosting with pink frosting, then doing the blue and red veins. It was labor-intensive, to say the least. Plus I think that I should have found a strawberry frosting recipe to go with the strawberry jam, but I didn't think of that till it was too late.

Bleeding Heart Cupcakes
from Clare Crespo

Preheat oven to 350. Line tins. Remove butter and whole milk from fridge.

In a medium bowl, sift:
3 C flour
2 ½ t b.p.
½ t salt

In a separate, larger bowl, cream 2/3 C butter (1 + 1/3 sticks?).
Gradually add 1 ¾ C sugar, creaming until light and fluffy.
Add 2 eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.

In a small bowl, combine:
1 ¼ C whole milk
1 t vanilla

To the butter mixture, add ¼ of the flour mixture and mix well. Add about one quarter of the milk mixture and mix well. Continue alternating the flour mixture and milk mixture, beating after each addition until smooth.

Pour into tins. Bake 15-20 min.


Vanilla Buttercream Frosting
In a large bowl, cream ½ C butter until smooth.
Add:
4 C powdered sugar
½ t salt
1/3 C whole milk
1 t vanilla

Mix until smooth and creamy.
Keep 2/3 of the frosting in that bowl. Divide 1/3 of it into two additional bowls. Color the big bowl pink. Color the remaining bowls blue and red.


Assembly
With a small paring knife, cut out a circle about the size of a dime in the center of each cupcake, going about 2/3 of the way in. Pull the little plug of cake out. Cut off the top of this piece (About ½ in. thick), and eat or discard the bottom. Use a teaspoon or a squeeze bottle to fill the hole partway with strawberry jelly "blood." Put the little cake plug back in.

Frost the cupcakes with the pink frosting. Make it super smooth by dipping the knife into a bowl of hot water and smoothing it over the top. With a pastry bag, use the red and blue frosting to make veins on the hearts.