Wanna cupcake, cupcake?

Delicious and unbelievably moist vegan carrot cake cupcakes (VCTOTW) and vegan cream cheese frosting

One good thing about my cupcake baking madness is that I buy much less sweet junk food. There is virtually no more cakes, cookies, candies, etc. in my house unless I am using the product as a part of a cupcake recipe. I am glad that this shift has occurred in my spending an deating habits. I am not sure if it was more intentional or just a natural inclination since I would end up with more than enough sweets with a dozen or so cupcakes on hand! Of course, sometimes I would go a bit overboard and have one (or two or three) too many cupcakes in one day but I blame that on (1) uncontrollable excitement of vegan goodness and (2) the fact that I'm my own taste-tester!

In anycase, I am glad that I have come to a point where I keep basic ingredients on hand--flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, etc--because I can whip up different recipes as I see fit.

I've even ventured into muffin-making! But, the cupcakes are still where it's at.

Wiki "mimosa"

Yum. A version of my "mimosa" cupcake. I am so glad that I have found options to my VCTOTW buttercream. I love the buttercream for what it is, but since I've tried the book's chocolate mousse and finally experimented with my own icings and glaze, I've gotten more excited about trying new flavors.

But, that doesn't mean that I should have made a strawberry cake this past weekend and eaten it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

But, oh did it taste good...

Brainstorming: Easter cupcakes 2

I am sort of sick of dealing with powdered sugar and sticky, sticky vegetable shortening, so I was looking for an alternative to the VCTOTW buttercream frostings that I usually made.

I mean, it was exciting at first that I found that I could make (1) frosting in the first place and (2) vegan frosting at that, but I was a bit scared about how much powdered sugar and cocoa storms I was inhaling. And, it was cumbersome.

The VCTOTW chocolate mousse has been amazing as a topping so far and it is so easy to make! It tastes especially good after the cupcake topped with the mousse sits in the fridge for about half a day, in my experience.

Well, I wanted to try something new and since I had plenty or marmalade on hand, I wanted to see if I could incorporate that into a topping (that wasn't just the cupcake topped with marmalade!). I was inspired by this simple recipe and tried it out first with my orange champagne marmalade. That experiment resulted in a creamy looking glaze that had similar ingredients to but tasted different than what I whipped up for this Easter.



I used the powdered sugar and marmalade, but this time I used strawberry marmalade (and added a bit of coconut milk). I was doing figurative back flips when I saw how red/pink the mix was turning out to be! It's not really a substitute for the "all-natural" food colorings I have been looking for (BTW), but it was an awesome way to have a colorful glaze!



The decorations are the same as what I used in the cupcakes in my last post.

BTW: Homemade food coloring for colorful spring cakes!

Brainstorming: Easter cupcakes

Last week I went all out and experimented with my VCTOTW cupcake recipes.

I created what I refer to as chocolate mimosa cupcakes which consist of the VCTOTW golden cupcake recipe with McKay's orange champagne marmalade added into the batter and the VCTOTW chocolate mousse on top.



For Easter, I replicated the recipe and added some decorations that I picked up at Earth Fare: vegetarian jelly beans, cocoa dusted almonds, and Annie's Bunny Grahams (in Honey). Damn. Those Bunny Grahams just un-veganized the recipe. Wonder about the jelly beans, too. If they were vegan, it'd probably say that instead on "vegetarian". Oh, well! Almost doesn't count, but these tasted good! Finally, I have faith in the Golden Cupcake recipe!