Mini Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting

As part of our Anti-SuperBowl party, I knew I wanted to serve something sweet, small, and cute. I figured miniature cupcakes would be just the thing and, this being the south, settled on Red Velvet Cupcakes.

My mother once described red velvet cake as "chocolate cake with a bottle of red food coloring!". These cupcakes put the lie to that description with a flavor all their own and only a few tablespoons of red food coloring. They are complex and nuanced and absolutely delicious.

This post has been linked up to Sweets for a Saturday over at Sweet as Sugar Cookies.

Chocolate Frosting

This recipe comes from Buns in my Oven" who swears by this as the most perfect chocolate frosting ever invented. I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but it is tasty and uses only ingredients I regularly keep on hand.

Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

I love and adore frosting. It's rich, creamy, sweet, and makes just about everything better. That said my own frosting repritore is pretty pitiful--buttercream (you know, the one on the back of the powdered sugar box) and cream cheese. But when we made chocolate cupcakes, I knew we simply had to have chocolate frosting. I didn't want to run to the store so I decided to try out the fluffy chocolate recipe from The Cake Mix Doctor since I had all the ingredients on hand.

Berry Compote

I had always figured that compotes were tough to make. I mean, anything saucy usually terrifies me. There's almost always lots of scalding and warnings to get it just hot enough but no hotter, lest you burn it and ruin the flavor. Suffice it to say, I'd clearly never made one. So when I saw a recipe in The Cake Mix Doctor that sounded not only doable but easy, I knew just how to incorporate those berries into our chocolate cupcakes. We made some modifications, so here is what we did.

Tropical Cupcakes

Generally speaking, I am not a big fan of carrot cake. Store bought carrot cake is a crime against taste, it's dry and full of raisins. Blech. Happily speaking, my mother happens to make some of the best carrot cake ever. In an ironic twist of fate, she calls it her "Southern Carrot Cake" and here I am in the south. And with, no lie, twenty pounds of carrots left over from an event.