Thursday, October 9, 2008

Vegan Mofo: Must have Cupcakes!

Pre Icing Minty Cupcake

I don't think the Vegan Month of Food would be complete without cupcakes so when I first learned about it cupcakes were the first thing on my mind. Naturally I pulled out Vegan Cupcakes take over the World, another fantastic book by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. Buy this book! It's the best resource, like their other books it seems everything turns out fantastically!

Well in this case they are fantastic and very yummy mint cupcakes but I got a little sloppy on the icing. This is because I forgot to pick up the green food coloring. I was planning on going all out and piping the icing on but since it wasn't going to be pretty green icing I skipped that step. Of course I didn't realize I didn't have green food coloring until after I added just a little too much soy milk to the icing, so it's a bit out of control. (I was thinking it could stand to be a little more fluid if I was going to pipe it.) And ...er...it was getting a little late and I was tired. Oh well!

The other thing that I'm not crazy about with these is the icing has mint in it. I think I picked up the wrong kind of mint. It tastes fine in the cake itself, but in the icing it's too much. It tastes oddly chemical, too much like a chewing gum flavor or something. Which is hard not to think about when the texture of the icing is more chewing gum like that say, cake. Well, lesson learned. I was thinking I'd save a bit of money and just pick up cheaper mint extract at the Jewel-Osco instead of the crazy expensive Whole Foods type. Of course now I realize just how much more natural the whole foods type would have been and that would've been worth the splurge. I'll have to remember to only use the cheap stuff in baked goods where it can be a little more buried in chocolaty cakey goodness. Did I mention the chocolaty cakey goodness on these cupcakes is just wonderful? Heavenly. Completely makes up for the mint incident, pretty much.

2 comments:

donesmoking said...

now you've got me cravin cupcakes...mmmmm :)

Bethany said...

I want cupcakes too!

I know what you mean by fakey mint taste. made that mistake before. didn't stop me from eating it though ;-).