cupcakes, cupcakes, everywhere!!

Well Wednesday was a baking extravaganza! It was Ciara's birthday (a friend from my nutrition course) and we were having dinner where I work which doesn't do desserts so I decided to bake vegan cupcakes. I always get ambitious so I wanted to do three flavours: vanilla and strawberry, chocolate and coffee.


I started off with a recipe from where better than from "Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World" By Isa Chandra Moskovitz and Terry Hope Romero.





GOLDEN VANILLA CUPCAKES
The ingredients:


1 cup of soya milk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 1/4 cup of plain white flour
2 Tbsp. cornflour (although I forgot to buy this so I just added a little more flour and it was fine)
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil (there is an option of 1/2 cup margarine)
3/4 cup sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract


(this recipe is slightly changed to what I did)

This made around 8 big cupcakes (I used a muffin tin)

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius. Mix the cider vinegar into the soya milk and leave to stand so it curdles a bit. Mix all the wet ingredients together and then stir in all the dry ones until well mixed. Fill muffin cases about 2/3 full and put into the oven for around 20-25 minutes until the cakes are springy to touch.

1 batch of these were left classic

1 batch had cocoa powder added (around 5 tablespoons- or until a lovely dark brown chocolate colour). 

1 batch had coffee added. I put a couple of table spoons of boiling water into a cup with 3 tsp instant coffee granules in and added to the mixture when they were dissolved.

Once they had cooled down I made butter creams:

225g vegan margarine

450g icing sugar

3 tbs soya milk

1tsp vanilla essence

I just mixed these in the food processor. For the chocolate icing I added 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder. For the coffee icing I made the same mixture as for the coffee cake mix but let it cool down in the fridge before I added it.

Before icing the vanilla cupcakes I cut out the middle, added some strawberry jam and replaced the middle part again.

I would have liked to pipe all the icing but I only had one piping bag and limited time so I just piped the chocolate icing.

To top the cakes I added a vegan chocolate button to the chocolate ones, a dark chocolate covered coffee bean to the coffee cakes and half a strawberry to the vanilla cakes.

I have to say these went down an absolute treat and everyone had different favourites. The surprise of the jam in the vanilla ones was a particular hit!