Vanilla Iced Chocolate Cupcakes

Yesterday I made chocolate cupcakes.  They're cool.  Now it's time to ice them!

I went back and forth on what kind of icing to use. I'm not a big fan of icing and I prefer something less sweet, but I needed something stable for a hot day and wanted to colour and flavour the icing in a couple of different ways, so I decided on a simple buttercream.  Here's what you need:

Icing sugar, butter, salt and vanilla.

I like weighing baking ingredients when I can.

You need 340g or 3 sticks of butter.

Using a mixer, beat the butter alone for 5 minutes on medium speed (4 on my Kitchenaid). 

Mix until light and fluffy. Here's how it'll look.

Meanwhile, sift 625g or 5 cups icing sugar.

With the mixer on low add the icing sugar and a pinch of salt to the butter.

Mix on low for 1 minute then mix on high for 5 minutes.

Once the mixture is fluffy and creamy, remove about half.

Now you'll need the vanilla extract, mint extract, red and green food colouring.

Now we're going to make 2 different flavours/colours.
To the icing in the mixer add a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a few drops of red food colouring.

Mix until combined and the colour is solid.  You may need to scrape down the sides of the bowl to get it combined.

Now you can just spread this over the cupcakes or you can be fancy and use a piping bag.

I used a plain tip to start .

But didn't like the look of it.  

The beauty is you can scrape off the icing and try again if you make a mistake. I used a star tip and liked the result much better.

I piped the pink vanilla icing onto half the cupcakes.

Then I made mint chocolate chip icing for the rest, but I'll show you that tomorrow.