Fun with Tie-Dye and Food Coloring

Last night I (finally) watched my wonderful Valentine’s gift from Melissa at Painting Mariposas in the Sky. It was the movie Julie & Julia and I absolutely loved it. I feel like ever since 2013 began I’ve been consistently busy with everything and haven’t really had a chance to sit down and share the recipes on my blog that I originally intended. There’s still some changes I’d like to make around these parts, things I would like to add as well as many recipes I still have to share with you!

Unfortunately I’m a bit behind on things, I wish I could be like my friend Marilla at Cupcake Rehab who was already testing St. Patrick’s Day recipes before Valentine’s Day was even over, eventually I believe I’ll get there! For Valentine’s Day I helped my daughter RiRi create some cute tie-dye Valentine’s day cupcakes. I bought this food dye with the intention of making similar cupcakes for D-Man’s birthday party, but I ran out of time and in retrospect we didn’t need cupcakes anyway! So it worked out, and I was left with two boxes of white cake mix and two packages of vanilla frosting. So when RiRi said she wanted to put some things together for her closes six friends, we decided to do the tie-dye theme for them, but in Valentine’s Day colors rather than the primary colors I was going to do for D-Man.

RiRi is in seventh grade now, and this is her first year not passing out Valentine’s to each of her classmates. She decided to put together a little gift bag for each of her friends with candy, chocolates, a card and a cupcake. Since I used box cake mix and packaged frosting, this isn’t necessarily a recipe, rather a fun project to do with the kids!

What You’ll Need:

• 1 mixing bowl
• 1 box white cake mix (plus ingredients listed)
• 2 smaller bowls
• food dye in your choice of colors, I like the color gels pictured below
• 1 package cake frosting, preferably a white like vanilla or cream cheese flavors
• …and a bit of time, patience and creativity. Sprinkles help too!

Duff Primary Color Gels

We started with the white cake mix, and the red food dye. Once everything was mixed together, we added two additional bowls. We separated the cake mix between the three bowls, one we kept white, one we just added one drop of red food gel coloring, and the last bowl we added about 10-12 drops of red to get a nice rich color.

We placed the Valentine’s Day themed cupcake liners in the muffin tin, and layered each color one by one with a spoon. We did the following three methods of layering to make them all a bit different.

• Pink on the bottom, then red, then white. 
• White on the bottom, then pink, then red. 
• Red on the bottom, then white, then pink.

I’m honestly not sure which was my favorite mixture to look at, I think they were all really cute!

Once the cupcakes were all baked, we opened up the frosting container and just dropped a few dots of red food dye in. I have a frosting syringe, so I just scooped some frosting with the dotted food dye into it, and when it came out through the icing tip it was a pretty tie-dye almost candy cane like effect. We dusted the top with some red sprinkles and larger heart shaped ones and her cupcakes were ready to go!

A closer look at the insides shows the layers of colors.