Abombinaball Cupcakes

Holy crap. Cupcake Challenge 1.0 is turning out remarkably well.

Today's project was Abombinaball cupcakes. Abombinaball has a remarkable vanilla mint scent which I thought would lend itself well to cupcakeification. I was right.

I'm not sure about the colour combo. Abombinaball has some gold and white and blue, so I made the cupcake blue and the frosting orange. I think if there were to be a round 2 I would do white frosting (if possible... I'll get to that in a second) and blue and yellow sugar sprinkles.

Frosting. The frosting is tasty, but I actually wanted something with a marshmallow consistency, not the soft consistency I got. I use Ricemellow Cream, which is a light gold colour (it's made with brown rice syrup, what did I expect...) and this is the first time I've ever used it so I had no idea what to expect. I think next time I'll either have to use some sort of agar frosting or else go with a plain cream cheese or butter cream frosting. The taste was phenomenal though.

Recipe? Sure.

Adapted from Isa's Vanilla Cupcake Recipe

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line cupcake pan. 

Mix together
1 c unsweetened almond (or soy) milk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar

Whisk together
1/3 c canola oil
3/4 c sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp artificial butter flavouring
2 tsp mint extract (I have the mint/peppermint combo extract)
Then add in the milk mixture and whisk till frothy (at this point I added somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 drops of blue food colouring. Optional for you, of course)

Sift in
1 1/4 c flour
2 tbsp cornstarch
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Mix up well, you don't want clumps, and then divide among the cups.  Bake for 20 - 22 minutes, remove from oven, cool for 5 minutes then remove to a wire rack and cool the rest of the way.

Frosting
Beat together
1/2 tofutti cream cheese
1 c Ricemellow Creme

Sift in gradually until smooth
3/4 c icing sugar

Add
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp butter flavour
1/2 tsp orange extract
1/4 tsp mint extract
some gel colouring if you want

It was quite liquid at this point for me, so I popped it in the fridge for half an hour. This was an unsuccessful ploy. This frosting is really frigging messy and I am unlikely to bother using it again. Thank god it's tasty.

Quite disastrous.

Holiday Baking, Recipe The First

I bought a new cookie cookbook the other day. The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur. Full of a billion (okay, 140) recipes that I must try. I think the most important ones to try first are the ones that are a possibility on the holiday baking list, since that's coming up soon and I can't just give away cookies that I haven't tried before. You know, quality control and all that business. Thusly, the first recipe I decided to try was the Snickerdoodle one. Is it weird that I haven't had Snickerdoodles before? Fortunately, it was a friend's birthday, and she is a lover of cinnamon, so I didn't have to eat the whole batch myself (or else I would have) because apparently I like Snickerdoodles. I also really like the word Snickerdoodle.

Snickerdoodle.

Snickerdoodles.

 

 

A couple of notes about this: 1. They didn't flatten themselves out at all, I flattened them out after I rolled them in the cinnamon sugar. 2. I think they needed to be more heavily doused in the cinnamon sugar. Even doing them like to you do the chocolate crinkle cookies - first roll in regular sugar and then in powdered (cinnamon) sugar might do the trick. 3. I think it was too cold in here for the Earth Balance to get the proper consistency when I was creaming it with the sugar. That might help the flattening and should help with the consistency, which was a little doughier than I expected. I'll try them again and see what happens, though they were certainly passable as was.