Anyway! Here is the recipe:
Vanilla Cupcakes by Erin Mckenna of Babycakes NYC
Copied from Epicurious
Ingredients
2 cups garbanzo-fava bean flour (gram flour)
1 cup potato starch (farina)
1/2 cup arrowroot
1 tbsp + 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
1 tsp xantham gum
2 tsp salt
2/3 cup coconut oil (a little too hard to find so I used grapeseed oil)
1 1/3 cups agave nectar
3/4 cup homemade applesauce or store-bought unsweetened applesauce
3 tbsp pure vanilla extract
grated zest of 1 lemon
1 cup hot water
The dry ingredients:
And the wet ones:
Oops - the dark bottle on the left is the vanilla extract..I didn't take too much care with these photos!
And as you can see I used Sweet Freedom Natural Sweetener instead of agave nectar. That wasn't out of preference so much as laziness. It's all they had at Tesco's. Next time I will go to Sainsbury's and buy agave! Also, the apple sauce was more than fine but I'm tempted to make it from scratch next time because I would like something less sweet.
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 325F/gas mark 3/162C. Line 2 standard 12-cup muffin tins with paper liners.
In a large bowl, whisk together the first seven ingredients. Add the next five. At this point the batter looks pretty gross but the next step sorts it out: stir in the hot water and mix until the batter is smooth.
Pour 1/3 cup batter into each prepared cup, almost filling it. Bake the cupcakes on the centre rack for 22 minutes, rotating the tins 180 degrees after 15 minutes. The finished cupcakes will be golden brown and will bounce back when pressure is applied gently to the center.
Let the cupcakes stand in the tins for 20 minutes, then transfer them to a wire rack and cool completely.
Oh man these cakes are so good! I don't think I've ever baked a more delicious vanilla cupcake. And on top of that they're gluten-free!? This must be witchcraft...did I just unknowingly create a potion and offer up my soul to the cupcake gods? Yes! That's right - I just insinuated that these cupcakes are divine. And I won't take it back.
I think I quite like this vegan baking malarky...no endless beating of butter! No sticky egg shells dripping all over the kitchen!
That being said...I did not attempt vegan frosting. Woops, that was a bit of an anti-climax after the above proclamations of love for butterless baking.
Well, I have more proclamations of love - for the traitor frosting actually. So goddamn tasty! And I'm not even that into frosting..seriously!
Vanilla frosting
(icing? I don't know what to call it any more! Both feel wrong...I have been conditioned, like most Britons, to consider the sweet gooey-ness "icing" but the icing of my childhood was merely icing sugar and water..never anything decadent that could be swirled. Ah, what a dilemma. Rather than deciding I shall erratically switch back and forth between the two. That seems like a sensible solution, doesn't it?)
Ingredients
230ish g mascarpone
80ish g butter, at room temperature
Lots of icing sugar....over 2 cups! Just keep going until you like the consistency!
Seeds of one vanilla pod
Preparation
Beat the mascarpone and butter until smooth.
Sift in the icing sugar and continue beating until smooth.
Slice open the vanilla pod and scrape out the seeds. Mix the seeds into the icing.
This is genuinely the best icing I've ever had. It seems so obvious, but for some reason I never made the extra effort and used real vanilla before. Mascarpone has got such a creamy, subtle taste - it means the icing isn't overly sweet..which is the reason I usually leave most of mine on the side of the plate.
Anyway...enough raving about vanilla frosting. Next I'll be bowled over by the TV remote. Time to calm down. As you may have guessed - I've had a lot of sugar today...
This was my first time using a piping bag to decorate cakes. Heh, can you tell?
I'm really not at all psyched about how they look, but it was just an excuse to start practising piping. I need a lot more practise! Which means...much more cake!
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