Frosted Red Velvet Brownies

For his birthday, my brother-in-law requested cupcakes. I learned from my sister-in-law that red velvet would be a good choice. But my time was limited--so making anything from scratch was kind of impossible.

One of my friends told me about a recipe that makes cake mix really moist--you add a pint of ice cream to the mix and bake! So I looked it up online to see exactly what the recipe was. I found it on ABC.com but at that moment abc was having a little trouble with their advertisements and they were strobe-lighting across the side of the screen. I'm kinda into online advertising and distractedly left the site after trying to guess the problem with the ads.

So it is no surprise that when I went to the store and then later made the cupcakes that I didn't follow the directions at all and just mixed the ice cream and cake together--with nothing else. It was a really thick batter but it seemed fine. I baked them and they looked fine. I pulled them out of the oven and they deflated...a lot. So the end result was something kind of like brownies or really dense cupcakes. They were good--just not cupcakes.

Do you make ice cream? We do. So the thing is this recipe premium ice cream + cake mix totally made sense to me with no additional ingredients because premium ice cream has eggs, sugar, cream in it.

The REAL recipe calls for eggs in addition to the ice cream and cake mix. Apparently eggs are what make cakes rise. Who knew right? Well I want to make it another try at this cake because I think it really could be good--but probably I should've stuck with regular box mix this time since I was in such a rush.

The Real Recipe

1 box cake mix, any flavor

1 pint premium ice cream, any complimentary flavor, at room temperature

3 eggs

1. In an electric mixer, combine all the ingredients

2. Fill cupcake cups

3. Bake

4. Cool completely

5. Frost

*Ben & Jerry's Red Velvet ice cream is so delicious. I don't usually like ben & jerry's cause it's a little grainy and it always has so many strange combinations with so much stuff in them. But I was seriously regretting my decision to put that ice cream in the cake when I tasted it. If only I really had regretted it then I would've just made regular box mix cupcakes and this whole dense brownie red velvet cake mix wouldn't have happened. You live you learn. Try that ice cream!