Camouflage Cupcakes

My friends son had a birthday on Saturday, and he is really into hunting, and the themes of his birthday parties as long as I can remember have been camouflage. So, for fun, I made camouflage cupcakes for him.

This is my basic white cake recipe.  You can see how the bowl has green in it already, I had to make a double batch, which I found out after I made the first batch, and put it in the cupcake tins.  So, my colors were different from the first dozen to the second dozen.

This was the first green.  I used green alone for this, since I wanted it to be a brighter, lighter green.

This is the second green.  By this time I was out of green food coloring, so I had to improvise.  The first batch I had plenty of green food coloring, so I didn't have to work as hard.  The first time I used green, a little bit of red, and a tablespoon of cocoa powder, to get a darker deeper green.  This batch was blue and red and yellow and cocoa powder.  It worked, but I like the first batch a little better.

The first time I made the brown in the kitchenaid.  I would suggest that for any other time this is made.  Mixing the cocoa powder in by hand isn't as easy as I would have thought.  So, brown was made by adding 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder to the white cake and a little bit of yellow, just to lighten it up.

I put a tablespoon of each color into the cupcake liners and then swirled them.  I used the sliver liners, which have a double liner, so no one could see that they were special, and I swear it made them tough.  I will never use these liners again.  I made a few bite sized ones with the leftover batter with no liner, and they weren't  tough.

You can see how I have two different looking cupcakes.  The first batch the chocolate layer was on top, the second batch the chocolate layer was on the bottom, simply because I had more chocolate the first time, and so I just filled the liners until I ran out.  I had enough chocolate from the first batch to fill all but 2 of the liners.

This is a cut open of the first batch.  You can see the dark green a little bit but not much.  They look kinda neat though.

You can see all three colors here, but they still aren't swirled like I would like.  I need to work on that bit if I do this again.

I made my fluffy cream cheese frosting for these, it's got whipping cream in it, so it is fluffier and lighter than a regular cream cheese frosting.  I colored it blue and yellow, as, like I mentioned earlier, I ran out of green.  It made it a nice color though.

So, that is my cupcakes.  They didn't go over as well as I would have hoped.  Once everyone at the party they went to got used to the strange way it looked inside, they thought they tasted great, but I forgot how visual the family I made them for were.  They liked the way they looked, they were neat, but not appetizing looking.  Oh well.  They were tasty, and I earned money for them, which was cool.

I also made a german chocolate cake for this same party, and that flew off of plates and they had pretty much none of that left, so that could also be a good reason why the cupcakes weren't received as well.  This family loves german chocolate cake.  What I loved was my friends grandma was there, and this is a woman in her 80's, who loved my german chocolate cake, and when you get a woman who makes everything from scratch and grew up doing it thinks your cake is awesome, that is one of the greatest compliments you can get, in my opinion.

So, anyhow, I had fun, and I plan on getting some more food colorings and making a double batch of my white cake mix and turning into rainbow layered cupcakes.  No swirls.