rainbow lemon dough mountains

Surfing cooking/baking websites has since become a huge past time of mine. Well I suppose when you sit in an office and you get to "work" when the phone actually rings, there's a lot of time to decide what you're going to make for supper. Hilary's blog is always my first stop because she has a great set of links where I usually janut off and explore. I feel that just by reading about other people's cooking and baking experiences, mine automatically improves, sadly this is not true.

My recent favourite blog is Picky Palate. I think she is phenomenal and has the best kitchen countertops. So when my amazing friend Katie invited me over to bake something with her, my heart immediately called for these colorful cupcakes. I had already made something from Picky Palate's blog, chocolate chip covered oreo cookies, and I love how simple her recipes are. They make kitchen noobs like me feel not so worthless.

I was really anxious while we were making them because I am always wary about pretty looking food because my logic is that if something looks good, it's rare that it tastes good too. Well my logic shot out the window when I had a bite of these rainbow babies.

I've always been boggled on how people made rainbow colored cupcakes. How is it that the colours don't mix and result to goopy brown mush?! My wonderings were answered when I saw how thick the batter was and how instead of colliding with each other, the colours nicely settled together in the cupcake lining.

I had a ball of a time mixing those five coloured batters together. I must admit that Katie and I went a bit overboard and put a little too much batter for each cupcake and we ended up with gargantuan palm sized mountains of lemony dough goodness.

We did alter the recipe slightly though. Picky Palate's recipe called for vanilla cake mix and instant vanilla pudding mix. We decided to go a little crazy and follow the rainbow theme by picking out rainbow cake mix and after discussing intensively in the pudding aisle, we decided that the regular pudding in the cartons were what we needed. We were wrong. Thank god Kate's mom, saved the day by pulling out instant lemon pudding mix (it's powder-ish) out of her baking drawer and we were set! The cupcakes had a little lemon twang to them, but they were yummy all the same.

We wanted to frost them with vanilla icing but decided to not completely cover the gorgeous colours of the cupcake, so a disastrous first attempt (I frosted a cupcake five minutes after it came out of the oven, so the frosting melted. Always let your baked goods cool!) we finally got the hang of these amazing icing nozzles which we used to decorate/draw on the cupcakes.

We ended up making swirls, heart shapes (for special people), stars, initials, little stick men and dots on our cupcakes, they were honestly a work of art.

I had such an amazing morning baking these with Kate, she's more lovely than the cupcakes. It was a great start to a great day, and I had a few of these delicious cupcakes to munch on all weekend!

PS: I am now so hungry and upset that I do not have these cupcakes anymore.