Raspberry Cupcakes

It has been a while since I have made some cupcakes.  A colleague of mine recently retired and so as most people do, we had a small retirement lunch in his honor.  I asked him what his favorite flavor was and he said "garlic".  I just didn't think that garlic cupcakes sounded very good, so I asked him for an alternate flavor; this time he responded "raspberry".

Once you understand about using sugar-free flavorings, like gelatin powder or drink mix powder, it really is just left up to your imagination to combine them in any number of ways to create new flavors.

 The first step is to enhance the sugar-free cake mix:

• yellow sugar-free cake mix
• 3 eggs
• 1/3 c. vegetable oil
• 1 c. 2% milk
• 1/2 c. non-fat yogurt
• 1 box of sugar-free raspberry flavored gelatin powder

Add in the box of flavored gelatin.  This is of course where you have the option of using any flavor you or your guests might like.

Mix together well.

 For these cupcakes, I decided to add a filling of raspberry jam.  So to start with, I added about a half of a scoop of batter to the cupcake liners in my muffin tin.

You can coordinate your jam flavor to your cupcake flavor.  Mix and match; there are a lot of flavor combinations.

 Put about 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of sugar-free raspberry jam in the center of each cupcake.  Next fill up the cupcake liner.  I know that most recipes only tell you to fill the liner 2/3 or 3/4 of the way full.  But if you would like a full, almost overflowing cupcake, you need to fill the liner almost to the top.  You won't get a full 2 dozen cupcakes, but those you have will be big and beautiful.

Bake according to the package directions.  After removing from the oven, cool for a few minutes in the muffin tin.  After a few minutes, remove to a cooling rack and cool completely.

Now comes the fun part; the icing/frosting.  What do you think is the difference between icing and frosting?  I guess that I have always just used them interchangeably.

I wanted to make the frosting raspberry as well.  It just so happened that I had a half a can of chocolate and a half a can of vanilla sugar-free frostings left from some other desserts.  So, I mixed them together and added another box of sugar-free raspberry gelatin powder and beat them together well.

I used a piping bag and a pretty tip to swirl the frosting on, but I didn't go all the way to the edge since I wanted the pretty deep pink color of the cupcakes to show.

The lunch was wonderful and everyone enjoyed the cupcakes...even if they weren't garlic flavored!