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Red Velvet is (apparently) my girlfriend’s favorite cake, and I would love to say that I made it for her, but in reality she lives 3000 miles away in California – where the weather is currently much, much nicer – so this batch of cupcakes is all for me.

Which is probably not really all that great for my thighs.

This recipe is from Bakerella, and is incredibly, incredibly moist with an almost runny batter that made my stovetop look like the site of a massacre.  They bake up deep red and soft, and look perfect with a huge dollop of cream cheese frosting on top. If this was actually for Valentine’s Day – when I started thinking about these – I might have tinted the frosting pink, but as February ends tomorrow, it stayed white. Regardless, the cupcakes look so good that I’ve already had two.

I halved the recipe, but the whole thing is posted here. I made a dozen cupcakes, a full batch would make twenty-four.

Red Velvet Cupcakes
Courtesy of Bakerella

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 Tablespoon cocoa
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups oil
1 cup buttermilk
1 Tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 oz. red food coloring

Preheat oven to 350F and line muffin tins with paper liners. Set aside.

Mix together flour, salt, baking soda and cocoa with a wire whisk and set aside.

In a separate bowl, mix eggs, sugar, oil, buttermilk, vinegar, vanilla, and food coloring until completely combined. Add wet ingredients to dry, and beat until blended and smooth.

Pour into prepared muffin tins and bake for twenty minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Let cool, and prepare cream cheese frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting

1/2 C butter, at room temperature
8 oz of cream cheese, at room temperature
1 t almond extract
2-3 C confectioner’s sugar

Beat butter and cream cheese together until thoroughly blended. Add extract and blend again. Add sugar until you reach your desired consistency and sweetness.

Spread or pipe onto cupcakes.

Perfect for a special occasion. Also perfect for a Saturday night when you’re not in the mood to do anything productive. Which is most Saturday nights at my place.

Today is that Hallmark holiday known as Valentine’s Day, and if I were keeping with the theme, I would post something sinfully chocolatey – brownies, or Devil’s Food cake, or the Chocolate Bourbon cake – or maybe red velvet cupcakes, which I haven’t actually ever made and should try one of these days. But no. You’re getting an orange cake, because I love oranges, and I’m spending Valentine’s Day with my cat and the season premiere of The Amazing Race, so I’m not baking chocolate if I don’t want to, dammit.

This is not to say that I have anything against chocolate – it’s actually mostly to say that I don’t have enough Ghirardelli to pull off devil’s food today.

This is one of my more frequently repeated desserts, honestly; sometimes I make the whole thing in a 9×13, sometimes I make cupcakes, theoretically I could do the layer cake thing at some point, but today I’ll be halving the recipe and doing one 9″, single layer cake. The recipe posted is the whole thing, though.

The cake is from Allen at Eating Out Loud, and the frosting is from…the 1976 edition of the Betty Crocker cookbook, and is the only buttercream recipe I will ever, ever use. Ever. Don’t fix what ain’t broke, people, and this buttercream is perfect.

Orange Sour Cream Cake

Via Eating Out Loud

3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. orange extract
8 oz. butter
1 1/2 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup sour cream
1/2 cup fresh orange juice

Preheat oven to 350F and grease and flour pan(s) (or line muffin tins with papers if going the cupcake route).

Cream together butter and sugar, and then stir in sour cream, vanilla, orange extract, and eggs until thoroughly combined. In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking soda and salt, and then slowly add to wet ingredients, mixing until smooth. Pour in orange juice and again mix until smooth.

Pour into prepared pan(s) and bake. If you’re doing this in a 9×13, bake for an hour. Make it 30-35 minutes for 8″-9″ pans, and 20-25 minutes for cupcakes. Set aside and let cool.

Orange Butter Frosting

Via Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, 1976 edition

1/3 C butter, softened
3 C confectioner’s sugar
1 1/2 t orange extract
2 T orange juice

Blend butter and sugar. Stir in extract and orange juice, beat until frosting is smooth and of spreading consistency.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody!

My feet are perpetually a mess. I guess I can blame this on the fact that I walk everywhere, on city sidewalks, in dress shoes – that certainly part of the problem – but I’ve always been prone to thick calluses and dry skin and heels that have gone beyond dry to cracked like the Grand Canyon.

I’ve used a lot of things on them. The most effective has probably been The Body Shop’s Hemp cream, and really, if it smelled better I’d still use it, but I have to put socks on after I use it, and then my socks smell like a boy’s bathroom in high school (you know the one. Close to the door that goes to the ag building, across from French, hugely popular with the…well. The stoners.) I’ve used Burt’s Bees foot cream but I don’t find it works as well as my mother claims it does.

I have a salt scrub that works semi-well, but needs a boost from something else.

The fact is there probably isn’t a quick-fix for this, my feet are too much of a mess for one thing to work – but I can’t keep myself from trying. So the search continues! Seeking: one lotion that slough the dead skin off my feet and moisturizes the skin without smelling like your boyfriend’s college dorm room.

…I’m doomed to fail.

You know, I’m 5’8″ tall. Okay, fine, it’s really 5’7″, but the point is I’m taller by either one or two inches than the average American woman, and yet I cannot for the life of me find a pair of jeans that are not too long. Why is this? Is there a vast conspiracy to make me wear heels with my denim, because in all honesty: No. No, that is not going to happen. I won’t even wear heels with a dress. I may wear heels when I go to opera in April, but I’ll be sitting down the entire damn time. I wear heels for interviews, which are blissfully few and far between.

I will not wear heels with bootcut jeans at work on a Monday, dammit, and you can’t make me. I’ll wear my cowboy boots instead.

Sure would be awfully nice if I could wear flats, though. Do I need to buy short length to do that?