Cupcakes…
Who doesn’t love them. Well, maybe some people, but this girl isn’t one of them. Recently I have found myself wanting to create my own recipes or at the very least put a spin on recipes that I find. I just really have been wanting to try and get into being more creative and why not do so with food.
This time I tried getting a little creative with cupcakes. I haven’t baked anything in a while so this was a bit of a challenge for me since cooking is more of my forte, but I’m hoping to change that up a bit.
For this recipe I was originally going to make vanilla cupcakes, but that just seemed too boring so I picked up Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World, by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. These are also the authors of Vegan with a Vengeance which you may have already heard of. I wish I had come up with that name, ha.
In the book they have a recipe for a basic chocolate chip cupcake and also have lists of variations to mix things up a bit. Ironically they had a variation for a Chocolate Orange Cupcake and I had just recently went grocery shopping and picked up orange extract so I decided to give it a try.
As for the frosting
I feel like I’m the worst when it comes to frosting and tried to do my best to come up with a buttercream frosting for the cupcakes. After looking through multiple vegan baking sites and browsing Pinterest to figure out where to start I came up with a simple recipe of mixing together vegan butter, confectioners sugar, almond milk, vanilla, and orange extract. It turned out tasting pretty good, but I will admit that this is more for icing a cake or putting one layer on top of a cupcake and is not made for piping. Lesson learned. But it still turned out great and I’m definitely looking forward to making a cake recipe in the future and trying out this bad boy again.
On to the the cupcakes…
| Prep Time | 10 minutes |
| Cook Time | 20 minutes |
| Servings |
cupcakes
|
- 1 cup soy milk
- 1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
- 3/4 cup Granulated Sugar
- 1/3 cup vegetable oil
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 teaspoons orange extract
- 1 cup All-Purpose Flour
- 1/3 cup cocoa powder I used Hershey's
- 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon Salt
- 3 cups confectioners sugar
- 3 tbsps vegan butter
- 4 tbsps non-dairy milk
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 tsp orange extract
Ingredients
Orange Vanilla "Buttercream"
|
|
- Preheat oven to 350 and line cupcake sheet
- Whisk together the milk and the vinegar in a large bowl and then allow to sit and curdle for a few minutes
- In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and salt
- Come back to the milk and vinegar bowl and add the sugar, oil, vanilla extract, orange extract and beat it until foamy
- Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and beat until no large lumps remain
- Pour batter into liners about 3/4 of the way and bake four about twenty minutes. Check with a toothpick to make sure it comes out clean.
- Transfer to a cooling rack.
- Combine all of the frosting ingredients into a mixing bowl
- Beat until smooth
- Once the cupcakes are cool you can frost them. Store any extra frosting in the fridge along with any uneaten cupcakes.
The cupcakes themselves turned out to be fluffy and had just the right amount of orange flavoring to it to give the chocolate a little kick. As you can see from my pictures I decided to garnish the cupcakes with candied orange slices. Of course this is completely optional, but since I take pictures I at least try to make things look nice. Just in case you want to try that out too I got the recipe here: http://www.simplysated.com/candied-orange-slices/
Overall this is a simple cupcake recipe, but different enough that you might surprise people with it. It is also really easy to add more too this or switch up the extract flavorings so try playing around with it like I did and see how it all turns out.