Patriotic striped cupcakes

I normally won't post two days in a row but I had another treat up my sleeve for the weekend. Cupcakes are my favorite thing to make; so in honor of the 4th of July I made red, white, and blue striped cupcakes.

First thing's first, ingredients:

1 box of Pillsbury (or whatever box cake mix or from scratch recipe you have) Classic White mix. (I always prefer white over yellow boxed cake mixes. I think they taste much better.)
1/3 cup of oil 
1 cup of water
3 eggs 
1/2 can of vanilla icing
Festive sprinkles and decorations 
Cupcake liners 
Food dye

(Sorry the above picture is slightly out of focus) Pour mix, eggs, oil, and water into mixing bowl (shown above).

 Mix together

Divide into three separate bowls. Then dye red and blue, I used about 5 drops for each. (Looking back I could have probably used a few more for each to get bolder colors - but I'll keep that in mind next time!)

I used long handle teaspoons for measuring (sorry no exact measurement) and poured one spoonful of blue on the bottom..

White in the middle..

And red on the top..

Bake in 350 degree oven for 16-18 minutes.

The colors came out a little more pastel then I would have liked.. but I'll live.

I used white cupcake liners so you could see the stripes through the wrapper.

Then icing and decorate however you would like! I did several designs. I made 23 cupcakes total but only put icing on 19 because I ran out of icing. -_-

So, it's another non-earth shattering recipe. But it's festive and easy if you are short on time! Have a very happy 4th of July weekend everyone!!