Red Velvet Cake and Nutella+Banana Bites

 Ok, let's get international! A very important thing has happened. While usually our blog is read by .. hmm ... maybe 5 people max, we now have an international reader! Straight from AMERICA (or the USA if you like it better this way)! So of course we have to be polite and write in a language he would understand. Besides, Red Velvet Cake was his special request and made for him.
I researched a little bit and while doing that found this recipe for Red Velvet Cupcakes. I immediately liked this idea as small cupcakes are so much more handy to eat as a party snack, plus they look adorable and cake would have been so serious and fancy-party-ish.
Making the batter was easy and really cool thanks to the red food colouring that made the buttermilk (I used the Estonian keefir) look very dramatic. I know I could have used beet juice or something natural, but I wanted the cupcakes to look very red and also I already had red food colouring at home so I went with that.
What you need:
1,6 dl flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp cocoa (I used the bitter one)
60 g butter, at room temperature
2 dl sugar
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
120 ml buttermilk
some red food colouring (or beet juice)
1/2 tsp white vinegar
1/2 tsp baking powder (I used söögisooda)
For the frosting:
about 100 g cream cheese (e.g. Philadelphia)
some vanilla sugar or extract
confectioner's sugar
about 1 dl whipping cream

Sift together the flour, salt and cocoa. In another bowl beat the butter until fluffy, then add the sugar and mix with an electric mixer for a couple of minutes. Add the egg and mix and then add the vanilla extract. In yet another bowl mix the buttermilk and the food colouring. Now while leaving your electric mixer on low mix the flour mixture and the buttermilk with the butter mixture in 3 sessions (first some flour, then half the buttermilk, then flour again, rest of the buttermilk and finally all of the remaining flour). Combine the vinegar with the baking powder, let it fizz for a moment and stir it into the batter. Put the batter into the muffin cups and put into the oven on about 180 C. I used a cupcake tin with the smaller cups so I baked it for about 10–15 minutes.
For the frosting mix the cream cheese with the vanilla and confectioner's sugar, then add the whipping cream and mix with an electric mixer.

I honestly thought I had ruined the frosting when it didn't come out firm. I had planned it to look like it does on the pictures in the original recipe. But that didn't happen. Anyways the guests liked my cupcakes even though the frosting was a little runny. Or they were just being very polite, hehe. But they ate more than one so I suppose it couldn't just have been them being polite. I sacrificed one cupcake to make crumbles for decoration.


Nutella and Banana Bites
I found this recipe but decided to change it up and use Nutella and banana instead. I've always thought these two go together well. So it was all very simple - I bought the dough from a store (shame on me), divided it into 2 equal parts and rolled them out in turn. I cut the rolled out dough into squares and just put some Nutella and pieces of banana on them. Then I cut the other half of the dough into same size pieces (or at least tried to make them the same size), put one on each piece that had Nutella and some banana on it and pressed them together with a fork. Then brushed them with some egg and water mixture and added some chocolate sprinkles so that they'd look a little prettier. I baked them for about 10 minutes on 200 C.



What you need:
Some sort of dough (I used 500 g pärmi-lehttainas)
Nutella
1,5 bananas
1 egg
Sprinkles for decoration