Cupcakes!

I love cupcakes. They are easy to share and eat. They look impressive to take to parties. Mini-cupcakes are wonderful for children's parties and nibbles at adult cocktail type parties. If you make them gluten-free there is usually at least one person at a party or pot-luck who will love you.

Yesterday, I baked cupcakes to sell at the Vegetarian and Vegan Society of Queensland stall at Greenfest. Here's a sampler:


Clockwise from top, they are cappuccino, carrot and walnut, gluten-free chocolate and vanilla.

Other than the cappuccino cupcakes, the recipes for the cakes are from the fantastic recipe book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by vegan cooking goddesses Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero ("VCTOTW"). The cappuccino cupcakes are the vanilla cupcakes with 4 tablespoons of coffee dissolved in around 1/3 cup of water, plus 2 rounded tablespoons of extra flour. For the gluten-free, I replaced all the different flours in the recipe with 1 1/2 cups of commercial gluten free flours.

For frostings, I keep the frosting fairly stiff so that it keeps its shape well. In the icing for the cappucino and vanilla, I used a simple vanilla frosting made with 3 cups of pure icing sugar, pinch of salt and 1/3 cup nuttelex and around 1-2 tablespoons of soy milk. The chocolate frosting has around half of that with 1/3 cup cocoa pwder and enough extra soy milk to make it workable. The carrot and walnut cupcakes had Isa's VCTOTW vegan cream cheese with around a teaspoon of lemon essence added.

They seemed to be pretty successful at Greenfest. There were many beautiful cupcakes left from the previous day. (To the maker of the lamington cupcakes: I bought one. Thanks, they were delicious!) We didn't put out my vanilla cupcakes, but most of the others sold by the end of the day. If you bought one, I hope you enjoyed it.

Well, now I am going to eat left over cupcakes for dinner!