After eating one of these puppies I seriously thought if I ever decided to become vegan… I could make it.

Last week I tried my hand at vegan cupcakes. I had been wanting to try the art of vegan baking since falling in love with some of the cupcakes that chose had posted a while back when I first started checking out her Livejournal. I remember a specific cupcake (although I can’t seem to locate it at the moment) that had a HUGE mound of frosting on it. The frosting especially had me at first glance..

So since successfully creating my first batch of cupcakes, where I was unable to make this fluffy frosting due to lack of the proper ingredients (namely the elusive vegan margarine) I soon set out to locate what I needed, and made my way to Trader Joes (a grocery store located in various and sporadic areas of the U.S.) where I had been assured I would find it. Luckily, it was there, and along with a few other items (some dark chocolate for another project, a loaf of ciabatta for last night’s fondue experiment, a bag of apples, and a few other thneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comings for upcoming kitchen adventures.) I made my way back home.

Today I decided I would go for it. I started early and quickly. It’s important with any cake or muffin batter that it not sit too long before being cooked. Something happens and basically you end up with flat doughy cupcakes and muffins if you don’t use it pretty much immediately. Apparently it’s even worse with Vegan cupcakes.

I got my recipe online, and it is very similar to the recipe for golden cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. I decided to go with a mix of coconut extract and vanilla extract. The combination proved DELICIOUS!

After the cupcakes began to cool I started working on the fluffy vegan icing. I wanted FLUFFY and had hoped I would not be disappointed. I totally wasn’t. I ended up with the fluffiest “butter” cream icing I have ever made in my life. Ecstatic, I decided it was worthy of dirtying my jumbo cupcake icing bag, coupler and shell tip. I coloured the icing light pink, since… light pink always looks good on a nice fluffy cupcake.

I took some of the leftovers from the sugar dough I had made for the last batch of cupcakes and made little hearts.

Here is what I ended up with-

Closeup so you can see the fluffy frosting and uber-fluffy cake!

I think I might even venture to say this cupcake is better than any other home made plain “white” cake I’ve made thus far! It really is true that the butter and eggs in non-vegan baking really does mask the flavour of whatever flavouring you add to the cake. Like I said before, I added coconut and vanilla and those flavours together enhanced the vanilla (Madagascar bourbon. Only the best for my cupcakes!) and really brought a richness to the cake that you can’t really taste in normal cake.

AND THAT ICING IS SO GOOD! I wanted to just eat it with a spoon, even though thats sort of gross. Haha.. it wasn’t grainy at all, and it wasn’t greasy.. which was sort of a fear of mine considering its made with margarine AND shortening. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s just plain good. Not greasy, not weird. Light and fluffy, I think I might have to use this on some of my non-vegan cupcakes. hehe..

I’ve GOT to get these cupcakes out of my house!

Have a wonderful day!
-A.

P.S. As one of the commentors said below, “regular” sugar is sort of hit and miss as far as the vegan standard goes. I forgot to mention that I only use beet sugar as a rule in any of my recipes (from a company that does not use bone char to filter their sugar), so.. for me its not an issue to buy special sugar

So here goes.. from an entry on Schmooed Food-

1 TB apple cider vinegar
1 ½ scant cups plain soymilk
2 1/8 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. kosher salt
1 1/8 cups sugar
½ cup oil
1 ¼ tsp. vanilla extract
½ tsp. coconut extract

Preheat the oven to 350º. Line muffin tin with paper cupcake liners, Set aside. (This recipe says it makes 22, but I stretched it to 24)

Place the apple cider vinegar in the bottom of a liquid measuring cup and fill the cup with soymilk to equal 1 ½ cups. Stir well and set aside for about five minutes (the mixture will curdle).

In a large mixing bowl, stir together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In another mixing bowl whisk together the soymilk mixture, canola oil, vanilla, and coconut extract. Add the wet to the dry ingredients and whisk together until all of the large lumps are gone. (the recipe actually said to use a hand mixer, but I felt that it’s much to easy to over beat your batter with a mixer, its better to just whisk it.)

Fill each muffin cup with ¼ cup of batter. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until a cake tester inserted in the middle of a cupcake comes out clean.

Let cool in the pans for 5 minutes, then remove cupcakes from the pan and place on a wire rack. Let the cupcakes cool completely before frosting.

The icing I used was-

1/2 cup non hydrogenated vegan shortening
1/2 cup vegan margarine (earth balance)
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup plain soymilk
1 tablespoon coconut extract
one drop of whatever kind of food colouring you’d like.

With a hand mixer or stand mixer, beat the shortening and margarine together until fully incorporated and fluffy. Add the powdered sugar to that and beat until the mixture is crumbly, but the powdered sugar is fully incorporated. While the mixer is still on, add the soymilk slowly, and then the flavouring and then the colouring. Beat for a few minutes.. just until its fluffy.

Make sure the cupcakes are FULLY cooled before frosting. The frosting melts quick, so the colder the cupcake the better. You can refrigerate the frosting, but if you chill it longer than a few hours, you’ll want to “re-fluff” it in the mixer before you use it. Just let the icing warm up on the counter for about 15 minutes and whip it in the mixer for a minute or two.

I have to tell you, this recipe makes DELICIOUS cupcakes and the icing is to die for. It is wonderful. I’m not even vegan and I want to make it all the time!

Use the cake batter immediately. If you don’t, you never know if you’ll end up with something more like a muffin, or more like a hockey puck.

Happy eating!

-A.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 8:18 pm and is filed under March 2007, The Cupcakes!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.