Rainbow cupcakes for kindergarten

Another post that I have saved for quite a while now ...

For my daughter's birthday we made cupcakes to take into kindergarten. She wanted rainbow cupcakes which we had made before in June. (I intended to post about it ... but never got to it.) I used a recipe I found on the blog Bethany actually. I did change it slightly though ... I don't like using food coloring very much. So I only used it for "blue" ... cause I could not come up with something more natural that would make my dough blue. (Now writing this I'm thinking I could have used the juice of blueberrys ... oh well ...)
I used pudding powder for yellow and the powder for red fruit jelly for red. For green I used the powder of instant green jello. Well, I know ... this is still artificial stuff and there is food coloring IN the powder ... I don't know why I rather like using this - sometimes I am just weird. :-)
Well, a nice side effect is that the different powders make the dough taste differently ... which food color only obviuosly does not. And I used cocoa for brown dough. I know ... a rainbow does not really have brown ... well, my daughter turned four and did not really care. It was supposed to be colorful - that's all that mattered! :-)



The process of making the cupcakes is kinda like making a zebra cake. You just drop spoons full of batter into the muffin cups. Above you see a picture of how it might turn out. This is actually one of the muffins from the first try in June. The kindergarten muffins actually ended up having horizontal stripes ... I think it has to do with how heavy the dough is which again depends on how much additional powder you put into it. (For example the chocolate dough tended to be the heaviest.) With food color it should not matter and the stripes should be rather vertical in the end.


We frosted the baked muffins with white frosting - kinda like clouds - and put rainbow stripes and chocolate/ sugar animals on top.

I suppose the kids must have liked them ... not a single one made it's way back home to us ....