Employed

Now that I'll be re-entering the workforce I sadly will have little time to bake and blog. I'll shoot for at least one post a week.

Birthday Order

A friend of mine ordered a bunch of cupcakes for his big 45th! I made a combination of chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter and lemon. The vanilla cake was an experiment and I think it came out really well, I used a chocolate cake recipe in the last post but substituted the cocoa powder for almond flour.

Chocolate Cake with Whiskey Buttercream Frosting

James found this great vegan chocolate cake recipe on the internet and I decided to go with it for a friend's birthday cake. I was amazed to see how simple this recipe is, and its delicious! I made two 9in cakes and assembled them with a whiskey buttercream frosting, truly one of the best frosting's EVER! I have to say the cake pretty much KILLED at the potluck. Hurray.

My only critique is that I don't know how to decorate a cake well. I think I'm getting better, but its still a little on the sloppy side. Next time will be better.

Tangerine Zest and Oreo® Cookie Cupcakes

I had an order last weekend for a few Tangerine and Oreo® Cupcakes, they turned out really well. I took the leftovers to a family event. I got good reviews from everyone.

Vanilla Blueberry Gluten Free Cupcakes

I got a special request from a friend to make gluten free cupcakes for an party, we decided on doing a vanilla cupcake with blueberry frosting. Thankfully the frosting was already gluten free. For this cake I used the standard gluten free recipe that you can find in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, this book has a lot of good base recipes that you can build off of. For the frosting I used a standard buttercream recipe;

1/2 cup margerine
1/2 cup shortening
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 of freshly blended blueberries

You can substitute 1/4 of blueberries for soy milk, juice, booze or whatever to get your frosting to compliment your cake flavor.

I really liked this combination, the blueberries were delicious and the cake was even better.

Order

Last week I made two dozen cupcakes for an order, I thought they turned out pretty...

Green Tea Reckoning

Baking again after a brief stint in Vancouver B.C. We walked into a few cupcake stores while wandering the city, not impressed. There's a local chain up there that has sub-par cakes that sit out all day long. Gross. I didn't see much in the way of vegan options in Vancouver, but I was only there for a few days.

I adore green tea, I think it works great in so many things, like cupcakes. I had my first green tea cupcake in Boston a year and a half ago, it was fantastic! The recipe came from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World (yes I'm still linking to Amazon® I'm not convinced that they purposely rigged their site to censor poof-oriented things) which is a fantastic book that everyone should own. And I do recommend finding it in a local bookstore, given the economy local is the way to go. I've made the book version several times and I wanted to put my own twist on the recipe.

Matcha (ground green tea) is notoriously expensive, especially the pure stuff. Always make sure that the ingredients read as green tea ONLY, a lot of company's out there mix in sugar and filler junk. You can Google it and find online companies or just go down to your local Asian Market, it tends to be cheaper there.










I use about 4 teaspoons of matcha per batch of cupcakes and they always turn out with a good green tea flavor. For my experimental batch I switched it up and used my favorite base of coconut milk and flax seed and modified a few other recipe aspects and came out with a very moist and delicious cupcake. I topped with a Green Tea Glaze that you can find in 'Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World'.

I'm working on a recipe for Green Tea Biscotti, hopefully I'll get it made and posted shortly.

Blood Orange Cupcakes With a Blood Orange Glaze

I saw some Blood Oranges at Wholefoods® and thought "I bet those would make great cupcakes". Turns out I was right, the Blood Orange flavor was amazing. I've never had Blood Oranges before this recipe, since then I've bought them twice. Apparently Blood Oranges are fairly new to North America which might be why I've never had one (most places don't carry them). The folks over at O'Biolla have this to say about Blood Oranges;

Blood oranges are known for their high vitamin C, potassium, carotene and dietary fiber contents, all of which have extensive health benefits. It has been well documented in the nutritional press that consuming several daily servings of fruits and vegetables, combined with three servings of low-fat dairy products, are effective in lowering blood pressure and other heart-related disease risks, while contributing to overall general good health and disease resistance.

I tried something new with these cupcakes and cut a hole out of them to fill with chocolate, then topped with a Blood Orange glaze and orange zest. Overall the cupcake turned out really well, but I think in the future I'll hold off on adding the chocolate inside, it distracted from the orange flavor. Or I'll fill the cupcakes with glaze and top with a orange butter cream.