Rich’s birthday was a week away and I still wasn’t allowed to eat any gluten whatsoever.

Now, this may not seem like a huge deal, except every year that we’ve been together I’ve baked him some sort of birthday treat. Last year it was the caramel cake for the Daring Bakers Challenge. Previous years involved cupcakes or cookies. How can it be a proper birthday without some sort of sweet indulgence? I suppose for this year I COULD have just made him something and not had a chance to sample it myself. Totally possible, not unreasonable. And yet, I didn’t like the sound of that. I’ve been very good on this diet; I’ve eaten very few sweet treats over the last few months. So I should be able to share some treats with my husband on his birthday, right?

Then I remembered Babycakes, the NYC bakery that is well known for its wheat-free (often gluten-free) vegan treats. And that a friend of mine had forwarded me one of Goop’s newsletters, that contained a few of the Babycakes recipes in it. I’d saved the recipes for a special occasion, and well, I think a birthday counts! Given I’m going to always be at some level of gluten or wheat-free, I figured I might as well just invest in buying the book, and went to the bookstore yesterday to grab a copy. I also spent some time skimming reviews of the book online.

The reviews I skimmed told me two things: first, that the recipes weren’t really foolproof, and second, that the frosting recipe isn’t popular – many had trouble getting the consistency correct, and also weren’t fans of the taste. Armed with this knowledge, I set out first thing this morning to whip up a batch of the vanilla cupcakes.

And the result?

I was so pleased to find these are a fantastic replacement for my usual gluten-y vanilla cupcake recipe. I made a few small substitutions to the recipe, in spite of the many warnings that the recipes would only really work if you follow them to the letter. I replaced the garfava flour with half garbanzo, half rice flour, as I couldn’t find garfava flour yesterday, but also because I’m not a fan of the strong bean taste of things made with only bean flour. As well, I didn’t have any lemon zest, so I left it out, instead opting to put in a tablespoon of lemon juice. And finally, I decreased the amount of agave syrup a little bit, replacing some of it with just plain water (to make sure the liquid amounts would still add up).

I noticed as these were baking they looked, well, like cupcakes! I’ve become so used to gluten-free baking over the last few months that I was genuinely surprised by this, as most things I’ve made have had different textures to their gluten-y counterparts. Different doesn’t usually mean bad, per se, just not what I’m used to. But with these cupcakes it was somewhat comforting to know they’d look like they were supposed to.

I found the baking time written in the recipe was a bit off for my oven. When I pulled them out after 22 minutes, they were a bit over-baked. I know, I should have watched them a little more closely, but hey, mea culpa. So if you make these yourself, do keep an eye on them after the 15 minute mark.

Texture and flavour wise, they’re awesome. Lightly vanilla flavoured, good crumb, not weirdly chewy like some gluten-free baking. Two enthusiastic thumbs up!

As for the frosting, well…. I decided to go with an old standby, the chocolate recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I figured that hey, I’m not trying to avoid all refined sugar for this, since it is for a birthday, after all.

The cupcake recipe is available over at Epicurious. Note that as written it makes 24, but it halves easily.

Chocolate Buttercream from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World

1/4 cup non-hydrogenated shortening, at room temperature
1/4 cup non-hydrogenated, butter-flavoured margarine (I used Earth Balance)
1/2 cup good quality cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
3 tablespoons soy milk (or other vegan milk)
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Using a hand mixer, combine the shortening and margarine. When well combined, sift in the cocoa powder and mix well. Then add in the powdered sugar, a little at a time, adding in splashes of the soy milk between additions. One everything is combined, add in the vanilla and beat well for about 3 minutes, until light and fluffy.

Makes enough to generously frost a dozen cupcakes, or lightly frost 2 dozen.

Back in February, I made a giant vegan chocolate cupcake with normal-sized cupcakes to go with it for the staff as their post-release treat. Why vegan? Well, a few of the staff can’t have milk, so I already had to do dairy-free, and figured I’d might as well go the whole way and do it fully vegan. I used my standard chocolate cupcake recipe, which is already vegan, and used the yummy buttercream icing recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, which substitutes in margarine for the usual butter. They were a hit! So when I was asked to do their cake again, I knew I’d have to come up with something really tasty, lest they think my vegan baking skills are slacking.

A quick flip through Vegan Cupcakes led me to the pretty simple idea of adding oreo cookies to chocolate cake batter and icing to make crazy chocolate-y goodness. Yum! Fortunately, oreo cookies are already vegan, so I didn’t have to buy anything super special there. I just grabbed a thing of Earth Balance for the icing and I was ready to go. And the results?

Sorry for the poor photo quality… I was pretty tired after baking almost 3 dozen of these babies. But I’m sure you can still tell how tasty they were. Hard to go wrong with chocolate, vanilla and oreos!

The recipe has been reprinted on Chow, so go there if you’d like to make these yourself. Which you should. But just be careful not to eat too many, lest you get a sugar coma.

For my birthday, I asked Rich to pick up some cupcakes from a bakery not far from our place, The Cupcakery. They opened last spring, and I’ve been eyeing them ever since.

Rich picked me up six different cupcakes in four different flavours: Cookies & Cream (vanilla cupcake with oreo bits), princepessa (white cupcake with pink vanilla icing), Back to Basics (chocolate cupcake with vanilla frosting) and La Dolce Vita (chocolate cupcake with chocolate icing). We had two of the Back to Basics and two of the La Dolce Vita, but each was decorated differently.

We both really enjoyed the cupcakes and found them moist and delicious with tasty icing. My favourite was the Cookies & Cream, probably because it reminded me of cakes from childhood birthday parties. They were also pretty reasonably priced at $2.50 each or $13.00 for six.

My one real complaint is that their website lists many more flavours than are usually available in store. Sure, if you call ahead and ask, they can make you whatever flavours you want in a custom order, including stuff that isn’t listed on the website. But you’d think that they’d have more than four or five flavours available for walk-in orders. Especially since the flavours they did have for walk-ins were pretty generic.

Final verdict? Delicious cupcakes, but not the best place to just drop in and pick some up. Rich tells me he got the impression from the look of the store that they focus more on their custom orders than walk-ins. If we ever do a custom order, we’ll post about it!

Oh and, by the way, if that cupcake camp sounds interesting to you, you’ve still got a few days to register should you want to enter your cupcakes for sampling. If you just want to eat cupcakes, you don’t need to pre-register – just show up!

The Cupcakery – 1034 St. Clair Ave W, Toronto. 647.430.7409.

Recently I made two pretty different cupcakes I wanted to share with you all.

I’ve been doing a bit more vegan baking lately.  I really enjoy the recipes, and usually discover a new ingredient or two.  But also, I have a friend who is allergic to eggs, and so vegan recipes are the perfect solution for baking when he’ll be one of the people eating the final product.  It just so happens his girlfriend recently had a birthday, and so I needed another egg-free recipe.  She said she really likes spice cake, like gingerbread or that sort of thing, so I googled around a bit until I found this awesome recipe for chai latte cupcakes. They honestly do taste just like a chai latte, and they even sort of look like one if you ice them and sprinkle some cinnamon on top!

The cake itself is 100% vegan, but for the icing I went with standard buttercream. To keep things vegan, you could easily top them as recommended by the original recipe (with spices and sugar), or, you could make vegan buttercream.

Chai Latte Cupcakes

Recipe originally from Post Punk Kitchen and also appears in the book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. Lightly modified by me,  so the cake base is still vegan, but my icing is not.

Ingredients
1 cup soy or rice milk
4 black teabags or 2 tablespoons loose black tea ** I used chai tea instead
1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 cup plain or vanilla soy yogurt
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1-1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
pinch of ground white or black pepper

Buttercream Icing
6 tablespoons butter, softened
3 tablespoons milk or soymilk
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups confectioners’ sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon, 1 teaspoon nutmeg, and 1 tablespoon sugar, for the tops

Directions
Preheat oven to 375F.  In a small saucepan heat soymilk until almost boiling, then add the tea bags, cover the pan, and remove from the heat.  Let sit for 10 minutes, then squeeze the teabags to release as much tea as possible before removing the bags from the soymilk.

In a large bowl whisk together oil, yogurt, sugar, vanilla and tea mixture until lumps are worked out. Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, cloves, and pepper into wet ingredients. Mix until large lumps disappear; some small lumps are okay. Pour batter into lined cupcake tins and bake 20 to 22 minutes until a sharp knife inserted comes out clean.  Allow to cool completely.

For icing: Beat together butter, milk and vanilla until smooth.  Add sugar a cup at a time until you get the consistency you want.  If icing seems to runny, at more sugar, if it seems too thick, add a bit more milk.  Spread or pipe onto cooled cupcakes.

Mix together the cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar, then sprinkle a bit onto the top of each cupcake.

Yum!

For my second trick… remember the giant cupcake pan we posted about last year?  Well, Rich found me one at a nearby Winners a few weeks ago, and I knew I’d have to put the pan to good use.  So now I present to you a giant cupcake, covered in buttercream and topped with smarties (the Canadian chocolate version, not the American candy version) as large sprinkles.

I know my decorating skills could use a bit of work, but since this was only about the 5th time in my life that I’d used a piping bag, I hope you’ll forgive me.  I hope to have more projects to practice my piping on soon.

For the cake base, I decided to go with an old Daring Bakers challenge, Dorie’s Perfect Party Cake.  I made 1.5 times the recipe in order to accommodate the large cupcake pan, which needs more cake batter than the typical recipe provides.  The cake turned out well, save for a few snags that are due to how the pan is designed. The bottom half of the cupcake cooks more slowly than the top half, because it is thicker.  However, as you can see from the picture, the two halves are contained within a single pan, so you can’t just remove one half of the cupcake when it is done. The solution I came up with was to turn my oven down to 325 degrees and turn the pan so that the bottom half was in the hottest part of my oven. Even then, the top of the cupcake came out a bit dry, while the bottom was just barely cooked enough. Next time I think I’ll cover the top with some aluminum foil once it’s nearly done, to help keep it from over-baking.

Another problem I ran into was the fact that the cake rose exactly as you’d expect: it domed up at the top, which meant that in order to join the two halves of the cupcake, I’d have to slice off some cake to make it flat again.  This was pretty obvious, but it wasn’t included in the instructions of the cupcake pan.  Even so, I didn’t mind doing it, and it gave me some extra cake to nibble on while I was decorating.  Win-win situation, I say.

Once baked and cooled, it was really fun to decorate!  I made bright blue buttercream for the top and chocolate buttercream for the base, and pipped it on following the pattern of the pan.  I used a bit of the blue to join the two cake halves, and put a row of smarties around the middle to help hide the imperfections.  About an hour or so of piping later, and I had this!

If you’d like to make this yourself, you can probably find the Wilton Cupcake pan at your local department store or baking supplies shop.  I’ve linked you to Dorie’s cake recipe above, which make an awesome, lightly lemony cake.  Just remember to make 1.5 times the recipe, and watch the pan so your cupcake top doesn’t burn.

I would like to humbly submit both of these to Sugar High Friday, hosted this month by the lovely Foodbeam. The event of course originated with Jennifer, the Domestic Goddess many, many baked goods ago.

Finding a good recipe could have been a challenge. One of my friends is allergic to eggs, and I wanted to make sure he could have a treat too! I do have some vegan egg replacer, and could have easily used that, but then I happened upon a fantastic chocolate cake recipe that doesn’t require eggs. Perfect! Just add some easy buttercream icing (also egg free) and you’re good to go.

Cupcakes:
1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 c. sugar
1/4 c. baking cocoa
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. water
1/3 c. vegetable oil
1 Tbs. white vinegar
1 tsp. vanilla

Combine flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, and salt. Add water, oil, vinegar, and vanilla. Mix well. Fill paper-lined muffin cups 3/4 full with batter. Bake at 350ºF for 25-30 minutes. Cool 10 minutes and remove from pan. Makes 12.

Icing:
6 tablespoons butter, softened
3 tablespoons milk or soymilk
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups confectioners’ sugar
food coloring (optional)

In a bowl, beat together the butter, milk and vanilla until smooth (about 3 minutes). Add in confectioners sugar; beat very well until smooth, adding more if necessary to achieve desired consistency. Add in food coloring (if desired) and mix well.