World Vegan Day - Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes

Disclaimer - the little sugar rose is sadly not vegan - I forgot to buy vegan-friendly decorations and since most of my recipients are not vegan I guessed they wouldn't mind!

Well, the clue is in the title - these are indeed vegan chocolate cupcakes to celebrate world vegan day, which is held each November 1st, to celebrate the founding of the world's first vegan society in 1944 by Donald Watson. Information shamelessly taken from the homepage of World Vegan Day. Check it out for more information! World vegan day has only been going since 1994 though!

I am not vegan, I am not even vegetarian (although the frequency that meat or fish appears on my plate is vanishingly small!) but I am a complete magpie - I like to be able to pick and choose the things that appeal to me most. October has just been VeganMoFo, a celebration of the massive variety of amazing vegan food produced and eaten by a talented, imaginative and committed group of people. VeganMoFo, the Vegan Month of Food is designed to showcase whatever the person blogging wants to talk about, as long as it's vegan. One of my favourite vegetarian blogs, Johanna at Green Gourmet Giraffe has been participating in MoFo this year, and she has produced some amazing things, as have so many other blogs I regularly read. The massive commitment here comes because the bloggers commit to posting either every week day, or every single day of the month. There really are so many inspiring blogs out there!

But anyway, back to the task in hand, vegan cupcakes. I bought Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (VCTOTW) quite a while ago mostly because I was annoyed that so many people were raving about recipes that I couldn't access (mostly on the Post Punk Kitchen forums) and I wanted a bite of the cherry (cake!) too...

These are the first cupcakes I've made from the book, and as luck would have it, one of the only three cupcake recipes on the PPK blog. It's a really interesting little book, with loads of different ideas that I definitely need to explore further. You can find the recipe here, with the original US cup measurements, but because I prefer to weigh I will give my measurements here. I will leave you to link for the method.I also used the melty chocolate ganache on pg 143 of the book rather than the choc mousse topping given in the link (though that does look particularly delicious!). I made a couple of minor amendments to suit what was available in my storecupboard.

Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes
Ingredients
225ml soya milk
7ml white wine vinegar
150g white caster sugar
70ml(g) light olive oil
1tsp vanilla extract
1/2tsp chocolate extract
125g plain flour
30g cocoa powder
3/4tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2tsp baking powder
1/4tsp salt

Oh yum! These are fabulous. They are so soft, light and moist and with such a deep, rich red chocolatey colour and aroma that you couldn't fail to be pleased by them. The topping was amazing too - it was just sweet enough, and stayed soft and slightly gooey sticky, and really complemented the cupcakes very well indeed. A tiny, minor point is that personally I found the cake a touch sweet, but other colleagues commented that it wasn't too sweet - opinions obviously vary!

Once again, as with my avocado chocolate cupcakes, I was really impressed by the dark red colour of these cupcakes and work colleagues seemed to like them too. I had a recipe request from someone who prefers to avoid eggs and my lovely vegan colleague was really pleased that I had made cupcakes that she could have, and I was thrilled that she enjoyed them.

I think these could definitely become one of my go-to recipes - the method is easy because you don't have to soften butter or do any creaming step, and there is no worry that the eggs will curdle the mixture. All of the ingredients are storecupboard, even the milk, as it is easy to buy long-life cartons of soya milk, so there is never any excuse to not be able to whip up a batch.

As I said earlier, I'm not vegan, but these are seriously amazing cupcakes, and more fool you if you skip making them because you aren't willing to accept alternative ingredients!!!  

Chocolate courgette cake

This is another cake to help those of you with garden gluts of courgettes. Admittedly, there will be other recipes out there that will help more, 225g of courgettes is only about 1 medium one, but sometimes every little helps, and this would be a great way to disguise courgettes for the vegetable hating, cake loving ones in your life. Obviously they can't just eat cake for ever though.....

This is also an appealing recipe because it uses oil rather than butter for the main fat content, so it's better for your health, and at the moment, your pocket too! It comes from the Green and Black's cookbook and was submitted to a competition they ran in Country Living magazine (probably many, many years ago now!) by a lady called Lindsey Barrow. I'd like to personally thank her for submitting this delicious recipe and think it's scandelous that she was only a runner up and not the winner!

One thing to note: the recipe doesn't fit into a 2lb loaf tin (well, at least it didn't fit into mine). This meant that the top crust was rather caramelised..... (aka burnt) so I shaved off a thin layer of cake. I also didn't bother with the recommended buttercream icing.

Chocolate courgette cake
Ingredients
175g dark chocolate
225g courgettes
200g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
1tsp ground cinnamon
110g caster sugar
175ml sunflower oil (I actually used light olive oil)
2 medium eggs

Method
- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease and base line a 2lb loaf tin (but see note above).
- Melt the chocolate (either over simmering water, or carefully in the microwave)
- Beat together the oil and eggs.
- Finely grate the courgette into this mixture and mix in to incorporate.
- Sift in the flour, baking powder, bicarb, cinnamon and add the sugar. Stir well to mix.
- Add the melted chocolate and pour into the loaf tin. Do not overfill.
- Bake for 55-65 minutes (mine needed a little longer) until the loaf is well risen and a cake tester inserted into the middle comes out clean.
- Leave to cool in the tin for a little while as the freshly baked loaf is very fragile.
- Turn onto a wire rack and allow to cool completely.

I took this into work, forgetting that I'd already taken the previous courgette cake to the same set of colleagues. Hmm, I'm starting to get a reputation as the person who bakes cakes with slightly odd combinations of ingredients in them. Never mind, I'm sure that all was forgiven when they tasted the cake, and I did indeed get good feedback about this one. I'm not surprised, it's delicious! It's extremely moist and very, very delicate - some of the slices broke up as I was lifting them to put into the cake tin. You (obviously) can't taste the courgette in any kind of vegetable like way, by which I mean that I'm sure it's adding to the background flavour of the chocolate cake, but isn't coming to the fore. Rather unusually (I think) you can't really taste the cinnamon either. I quite often find that cinnamon can be overpowering in cakes, and here it's very subtle. I definitely wouldn't pick it out as cinnamon if asked, but the cake has a lovely complex flavour and although it isn't obvious from the pictures, is the most gorgeous reddish brown, rather than being completely brown, if that makes sense?

Would defnintely make again, and recommend this to others too but with the proviso that there's too much mixture for the specified tin.

Too much cake for tin results in burnt top - answer, shave the top layer off!

Edited to add this to Jac's of Tinned Tomatoes Bookmarked Recipes event. This event was founded by Ruth of Ruth's Kitchen Experiments. I have to admit that I've had the Green and Black's cookbook for years now and I think this is possibly the first thing I've made out of it!

Nectarine and redcurrant muffins - Random Recipes

For Dom's random recipe challenge I pulled down a few of the baking books I consider my favourites, and then tried really, really hard to decide which was my favourite. I eventually decided on 'On Baking' by Sue Lawrence which regular readers will know that I've mentioned quite a few times on the blog. It's just such a lovely book - there's always something in there that I want to make, and she gives a little background to each recipe, be it a brief historical reference or a family anecdote. This makes it a really good book to read for pleasure, as well as having delicious recipes. The random number generator indicated page 66 was the one to go for:

And on page 66 can be found the recipe for crunchy-topped raspberry and cinnamon muffins. Yum. I adapted them slightly to use the ingredients I had around, which didn't include dairy milk (I've probably mentioned before that I don't have cereal with milk and don't drink tea or coffee, which pretty much renders milk unneeded in my house) so I substituted some rice milk that is in a handy little carton, and keeps for ages rather than constantly having a pint of milk going off in my fridge. And obviously, I substituted the fruit. But I still think I'm keeping to the random recipe nature of the challenge - after all, fruit is fruit!

Rather proudly, my muffins contain homegrown redcurrants!!! They're pretty much the only thing I've managed to grow this year, so I'm particularly pleased with them! And yes, I know you can't tell they're homegrown, but I promise they are!

I also made 6 muffins, which I think you'll agree is the correct amount. The recipe specifies that these ingredients make 12. Yes, 12 for the citizens of Lilliput....

Anyway, this is what I did:

Redcurrant and nectarine muffins (dairy free)
Ingredients
140g self raising flour
55g caster sugar
1 egg, beaten
3tbsp sunflower oil
3tbsp rice milk
1 nectarine, chopped fairly small
45g redcurrants
demerara sugar for sprinkling

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 5/190C. Line a 6 hole muffin tin (or, obviously, 6 of you usual 12 hole muffin tin!)

- Mix together the flour and sugar in a large bowl.

- Mix together the rice milk, oil and egg in a jug.

- Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until no flour remains, adding the fruit near the end of mixing.

- Divide between the six cases, sprinkle with demerara sugar and bake for 20-25 minutes until risen and golden.

This was a great random challenge, because I probably wouldn't have made these otherwise and they were quick, easy and tasty, which is a winning combination in my book! The muffin was light and moist and the crunchy sugar on the top was a lovely contrast to the springy, soft muffin. The bursts of fruit were very welcome, as was the knowledge that these are low in saturated fat and relatively low in fat in general, with just under a tbsp of sunflower oil each. Very successful, and I might make them again with different fruit if I want a light textured muffin. But I really don't think I could have got 12 out of the recipe.