Egg Free Allergy Friendly Tie Dye Rainbow Cupcakes

Finding recipes that are egg-free/allergy friendly and don't contain a lot of random strange ingredients that I never have in the house can be tough. So I pick and mixed from several recipes to create my version of egg-free tie dye rainbow cupcakes. I got my inspiration from I am Baker's Homemade White Cake Mix, Spearmint Baby's Rainbow Cupcakes and Omnomicon's How to Make a Rainbow Cake. I very rarely find a straight up allergy friendly recipe I like so I end up researching and making up my own.

Tie Dye Rainbow Cupcakes

Mix together:
2 3/4 cups self-raising flour (US people just use normal flour)
1 3/4 cups SUPER fine sugar (caster sugar in the UK)
2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt

Add in roughly 12oz of Sprite. I added 8oz first and then a little more until it was a cake like consistency I liked. Leave it a little bit thicker than you'd like because you'll be adding food colouring next which will thin it out.

Put 3/4 cup of batter into 4 bowls and then add different coloured dyes to each bowl until you have four different coloured bowls. Don't worry about over mixing because any extra air you whip in will make the cupcakes lighter. Toddler love stirring things so that kept Blondie Boy busy.

Preheat your oven to 160/325.

Line a cupcake/muffin tray with white cupcake liners. Blondie Boy also helped out here. If you have an older child you could have them count out the liners, too. I made 16 cupcakes but if you want slightly larger ones you could do just 12 no problem.

Now spoon one teaspoon of your first colour of batter into each liner. Next drop another teaspoon of the second coloured batter on top of that slightly askew. Repeat with the remaining two colours.

Shove them into the oven; mine took 25 minutes but I had both trays in at the same time. Keep an eye on them as egg-free cupcakes can burn easily. You'll know they are done when a toothpick comes out clean/dry.

For the frosting I got lazy. I forgot I didn't have any icing/powdered sugar and didn't feel like running to the store so I made semi-homemade frosting.

Frosting
Tub of Vanilla Frosting
Zest and Juice of one Lime
Zest of one Lemon & Juice of Half of a Lemon

Mix the Zest with the Juice and let it sit in the fridge for at least one hour.

Strain off the juice (discard the zest) and add it to one tub of vanilla frosting. Mix until well combined and then refrigerate until thickened/stiff but not hard. I couldn't wait for it to firm up so I spread some frosting on rather than piping it and topped with coloured sugar (mix sugar and food colouring and let dry).

I could only find two of my neon food colouring bottles so I wasn't 100% happy with the brightness of the colours but the didn't turn out bad. Gel or paste food colouring will producer brighter colours than regular food colouring. 

If you want to be healthy you can use Sprite Zero, sub in Splenda for the sugar and leave off the frosting. I haven't figure out the Weight Watchers points but I'm more than happy to if someone would like me to do so!

I call the tie dye rainbow because the white paper looks Tie Dyed to me but Blondie Boy calls them rainbow so I've pick and mixed to again for the name. I think they are lots of fun and I know Blondie Boy and I had fun making and eating them!