LET'S EAT: CAMO CUPCAKES

Camo Cupcakes!!

Last week I was looking for a fun treat to make for a girl's night, and since we were going to watch 10 Things I Hate About You and Mean Girls, I wanted to find something that fit the theme (aka, girly high school movie). Although I was very tempted to make a Burn Book cake, I didn't have the time or resources required. Instead, I know it's a little bit of a stretch, but I decided on camouflage cupcakes. (Cady Herron wears army pants and flip flops. And I thought they played paintball in 10 Things I Hate About You, but it's more of a paint balloon fight.) I also decided to make half of them green camo and half of them pink camo. Ok, here we go!

  
INGREDIENTS:
So, this project was more about the effect and less about the baking. Therefore when it came to ingredients I made it as simple as possible.
Box of cake mix (white or a shade thereof, so the dye can easily be seen of course)
Ingredients for the box mix (I needed the oil and the eggs)
Cupcake tin and liners
Gel food coloring (You could probably use the liquid drops, but from what I read this looked much bolder, so I tried it out. And you should be able to find it at the grocery store in the baking aisle.)
Several small bowls and several spoons for mixing your colors

Necessary Ingredients

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER:
First whip up that cake mix, following whatever directions are on the box.
Then, since I was doing two different colors, I divided the batter in half, and from there into four (I left the white for each in the original bowl because it wasn't getting dyed)
The gel box came with some "recipe" instructions for color mixing, which I tried to follow but didn't use exactly if I wasn't getting the color I wanted. So I'll try to explain how I made my colors:

• Shades of pink: For the pink on the far right, I followed the instructions on the box to get a "rose" color, which called for one blue drop and nine red drops. I thought the color ended up being a little bluer than I wanted and sort of ugly, but also fitting the camo motif so I kept it. I think I might have added a couple extra red drops to get it to look pinker, but I would not do any more blue than the one drop. For the middle pink I just added a bunch of red drops, and for the far left pink I used a couple red drops so it would be fairly light.
• Shades of green/brown: The green on the far right was just several drops of green so that it would be bright (this was harder with the green than the red, I had to use quite a bit more) and then maybe one drop of yellow to keep it from looking basic. The middle green was achieved by using less drops of green, and a little more yellow. The brown on the far right was a bit tricky, and the suggestion was a couple drops of blue, several of red, and one of yellow. This one looked pretty red so I added some other colors. I mean, brown is kind of an easy color to make by just mixing all the colors together. Alternatively, you could always just use chocolate cake :)

Each color in a separate bowl.

After dying the different bowls, I just used the spoon and dripped each color into each of the muffin tins one at a time, trying to alternate what side I would put each color on so they were layered and more mixed up. This took less time than you'd think, and I found that controlled spoonfuls worked just fine although you could get fancy and try piping bags.

Green camo after the first layer of batter

Pink camo after the first layer of batter

Follow the cupcake instructions on the box mix for baking. Let cool, and frost. Again, I just bought a basic Betty Crocker can of vanilla frosting and mixed up some pink and green frosting to go on top.

After frosting

A glimpse at the inside, looks pretty good!

I cracked this one open so you could see the inside, and although some of the layers mix around a bit and settle before you bake them (and this will happen less the faster you are and if you layer them very carefully) I think they look pretty darn good!

What do you think? Any tips or anything you would do differently? We'd love to hear about it!