disaster cupcakes made with love

*Update* Jared actually liked the "frosting." I believe him since he ate 3, one right after the other!

Jared and I are celebrating our 3rd wedding anniversary today! Well, we are at least acknowledging it because Jared is working tonight and won't be home until late. I still wanted to make today extra special, so I made chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter “frosting.”
I got both the cupcake recipe (pg. 37) and frosting recipe (pg. 151) out of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The cupcake part turned out perfectly moist, rich and chocolaty, much like a Devil's Food cake. The peanut butter frosting on the other hand was just plain awful.
I'm not sure how people make a perfectly "fluffy" frosting, but I have never had any luck, vegan or not. I know it can be done, as I have eaten my fair share of homemade cupcakes, including way too many at my first vegan potluck I attended. I know it can be light and airy with the perfect balance of fat, sugar and flavor, but whatever disaster I whipped up today wasn't it. Mine turned out greasy, way too sweet and a thick and somewhat separated goo. Even though I was expecting a pillow of whipped peanut butter atop the perfect chocolate cupcake, I wouldn't have minded the texture of the frosting so much if the taste wasn't so bland. Really, it just tasted like oily powdered sugar with little evidence of peanut butter flavor. For some reason though I was hopeful that the peanut butter goo would match up all right with the chocolate cupcake but that was just wishful thinking. Oh well.
Since the cupcake part did turn out so well, I think I may just scrape the frosting off and save the bottoms to eat with a cold glass of soymilk when Jared gets home tonight.

While it would have been nice to make the perfect cupcake to surprise Jared with, today isn't about that. Today is about making something with all my love for someone I am so lucky to be married to. Disaster or not, I know Jared will appreciate the effort!

Carrot Pineapple Cupcakes with Coconut Maple Icing

When I first read Dr. Stonielove's Nonfat Carrot Cupcakes recipe, I thought I had everything I needed to make these beauties. Then half way into reading the recipe more thoroughly, I discovered I didn't have maple extract and didn't have enough maple syrup for the sweetener part of the cake recipe. I also don't care for raisins so I decided to go on with the "skeleton" recipe and improvise with what I had and liked. Instead of maple extract, I used vanilla extract. and instead of using 1/2 cup of maple syrup, I used about 2 tablespoons of unbleached granulated sugar, 2 tablespoons of maple syrup and 1/4 cup of brown sugar. I also added the juice of one 8 oz can of crushed pineapple, which yielded about 1/2 cup of juice and I used orange juice for the remaining 1/2 cup of liquid. I also added the drained crushed pineapple to the recipe. These turned out remarkably well considering I made a lot of changes. My tongue could tell there wasn't any fat in the cupcake recipe but luckily, the icing made up for it. For the icing, which is NOT nonfat, I only had to substitute the maple extract with vanilla extract and added a tablespoon or so of pure maple syrup. I kinda wished the icing had a bit of Tofutti cream cheeze in it to cut the sweetness down a bit, but I didn't have any to add.
All and all, this was a success. Even though I changed a few things, Dr. Stonielove gets the credit for these half healthy, half decadent cupcake treats! You rock Dr. Stonielove!
Just iced and dusted with cinnamon!

About to be devoured!

Oh, yeah! As the big bite shows, these rocked!

Sesame Crusted Seitan, Lemon Gem Truffles

I know anyone reading this blog knows how wonderful it feels to be in the kitchen after not being in it for a while. I spent a good couple of hours in the kitchen today making homemade seitan and what was suppose to be Lemon Gem Cupcakes. Both the seitan recipe and the cupcake recipe came from Vegan With A Vengeance. The seitan turned out pretty great and the cupcakes turned into a complete disaster.
First up, the homemade seitan. This recipe is simple, used only a few ingredients and was easy to follow. It was the first batch of seitan I made that didn't turn out too mushy. For the wet ingredients, I had to use ketchup instead of tomato paste because I only had frozen tomato paste (that's how I store left over tomato paste from the can). I also added a couple of bouillon cubes to the cooking broth for extra flavor. This recipe made so much seitan! For dinner tonight I wasn't super hungry so I made some sesame crusted seitan nuggets. I coated the nuggets in flour, then into a flax meal/water slurry and then into toasted sesame seeds. I fried the nuggets in a little canola oil and made a dipping sauce of Dijon mustard and maple syrup. This was sooo good!

Now on to the cupcakes. They turned out horrible. Jared made these cupcakes before and had disastrous results as well, but I thought I'd give them another shot. The batter was so runny that it spread over the top of the muffin tin and made a crunchy flat top. I made the lemon icing which was also too runny and had a weird texture. So, following one of my fellow blogger buddies, Amanda from Walking the Vegan Line, I made these cupcakes into truffles!!! I added the cupcakes to the food processor to make them into crumbs and added enough of the lemon icing to hold the crumbs together. I used a small ice cream scoop to get equal mounds and rolled them into balls. I then dunked each ball into the remaining icing and put them in the fridge to set up. While they tasted like lemon truffles, they kind of looked liked glazed doughnut holes. Amanda is a genius!

Bike Race & Brunch

Hello. This is Jared posting on Lori's behalf, which I will be doing until she heals up from her fall and regains use of all her limbs. I haven't had a chance to cook much, so we have mostly been getting take out. However, we did get out this morning for vegan brunch at 11:11 Teahouse which was part of the SOPO's Broken Hearts and Bicycle Parts Race I took part in yesterday. The race was so much fun, and brunch was awesome. We were so busy devouring yummy food from the ATL's finest vegan cooks, we forgot to take many pictures. The only one we got was of this chocolate mint cupcake, which I'm pretty sure was from Dulce Vegan. It was very tasty.