Vegan Vanilla Cupcakes with Fresh Strawberry Frosting

A friend of mine gave me some Valentine's Day themed cupcake liners recently, so what better incentive is there to make pink frosted goodies to celebrate the upcoming holiday? My sister was coming for dinner over the weekend and, being lactose intolerant, she doesn't often get to indulge in the sweets we like serve. Instead of just making the cupcakes lactose free I decided to make them fully vegan to try something new.

The result? 

Tada! Pretty cute, don't you think? 

I adapted the recipe slightly from here, so I'm posting the ingredients/methods I used.

Ingredients

	1	cup vanilla soy milk
	1	tsp. apple cider vinegar
	1¼	cups all-purpose flour
	2	Tbsp. cornstarch
	¾	tsp. baking powder
	½	tsp. baking soda
	¼	tsp. salt (increase salt to ½ teaspoon if you’re using oil instead of margarine)
	½	cup non-hydrogenated margarine, softened
	¾	cup sugar
	2½	tsp. vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line muffin pan with cupcake liners.
2. Whisk the soy milk and vinegar in a measuring cup and set aside for a few minutes to get good and curdled.
3. Sift the flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into a large bowl and mix.
4. In a separate large bowl, use a handheld mixer at medium speed to cream the margarine and sugar for about 2 minutes until light and fluffy. (Don’t beat past 2 minutes.) Beat in the vanilla then alternate beating in the soy milk mixture and dry ingredients, stopping to scrape the sides of the bowl a few times.
5. Fill cupcake liners two-thirds of the way and bake for 20 to 22 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack, and let cool completely before frosting.

I meant to grab a photo, and I thought I had, but the cupcakes actually collapsed after I took them out of the oven. I'm not sure what the reason was, but it didn't make a huge difference. The overall texture and flavour was incredible, and the scoop in the center just left room for more icing! 

I actually used vanilla that I made at home from scratch. Kinda cool, huh? All you do is take 2 vanilla beans, split them down the middle and soak them in a jar with some vodka for 2 months, shaking weekly. Make sure it's an airtight container and kept somewhere dark.

Anyway, frosting! Check this beauty out:

Delicious!

I'm simply going to link the recipe for this, as I followed it fairly closely. They only thing I didn't do according to recipe is let the reduction cool be before moving on to the cornstarch and salt step. I'm not sure how that would have impacted the recipe but it definitely shaved off some time. 

If you're going to be making this frosting I recommend trying to make the strawberry reduction the night before, it will make things feel like they're moving much faster. The original recipe calls for 1/2lb of strawberries but  I recommend going for 3/4-1lb just to be safe. After reducing it I didn't have quite what was needed, which I'm sure would have been quite lovely. 

Party time! 

Sweet Potato Chips & NOTD

Wow, long time no blog! I've been pretty uninspired lately in terms of nail polish.. being broke has a really big impact on  the excitement levels I feel towards .. well, pretty much everything. However, I couldn't resist photographing the snack I made today so I took a quick shot of my fingernails too.

Anyway - Sweet potato CHIPS. That's right. They were simple enough to make, all I did was sliced the sweet potato,  lay it out on a baking sheet, sprinkled with a bit (too much) sea salt and bake for an hour or so. It turned out so-so. The trick here is to make sure to evenly slice the chips so they all cook at the same rate. Some were too chewy, some were perfectly crispy. I also ended up putting WAY too much salt without realizing, so that wasn't too nice either. Overall the experience was "meh" but I'm willing to try it out again sometime soon.

They cooked for just over an hour at 250 degrees.

And my nails!

I alternated between Rimmel's Grey Matter and China Glaze Secret Peri-Winkle.

Sorry for the long silence! <3

Breakfast: Gordon Ramsay's Scrambled Eggs

I love Gordon Ramsay's quick and easy youtube videos. They're easy to follow and won't take up too much of your time. I forget where I stumbled upon this video, heck, I probably Stumbled Upon it. I finally got around to making this for breakfast today and, oh my god, they were delectable.

Adding the butter in directly with the eggs made all the difference in the world. I used a bit of skim milk instead of creme fraiche, there is something to be said about maintaining a waistline here (and the fact that I just didn't have any), it worked just fine.

 

 Bon apetit! 

St-Patrick's Day Food: Irish Soda Bread & Chicken Stew

For the meal I made on St-Patrick's Day I wanted to make something authentic and Irish. Since I'm not too big into drinking anymore I wanted to celebrate in a more delicious way. My best friend got me a really neat recipe book for Christmas called Food Fest 365 that shows a national food holiday for every day of the year and a recipe to go with it.This is where the Irish Soda Bread came from. I'm pretty sure due to copyright I can't post the recipe, but here are some images of the process.

I've only made 2 recipes from this book and they've both been wonderful!

I actually made this bread to go with a stew, which I found here. I omitted the dumplings because I was making the bread. My only qualm with this recipe (other than forgetting to put the chicken in, which was entirely my fault) was only quartering the potatoes. They don't really break down in the broth, so I had to go in and break them down myself afterward, which was kind of a pain.
So - instead of quartering the potatoes I recommend cubing them.

The bread was perfect for dipping. Since its wasn't yeast-leavened it was quite dense and perfect for making the meal even heartier.

St-Patrick's Day Food: Banana Cookies

This is a recipe I made on St-Patty's day, not because it's Irish, but simply because it sounded AMAZING. Cookies that taste like banana bread? I'm for it! I was blown away by how good these cookies were. The were soft, fluffy, and had the perfect amount of banana flavour (I didn't add the extra flavouring, it wasn't necessary). The frosting was quite pleasant too, it complemented the fruitiness of the banana. I would have never thought to make a brown sugar icing before, but now I want to put it on everything. For St-Patty's day I also dyed them green!

I got the inspiration from Dizzy Girl Bakes, but the recipe itself came from Krumkake.

All the required ingredients

Sugar, butter, shortening

Mashed banana!

Egg, sour cream, banana, vanilla

Flour, baking soda, salt

Mix mix mix!

Green. This was actually rather tricky, the dough was quite brown so I had to use a ton of food colouring.

I made mine quite large. I only got 24 when the recipe calls for 36.

Done!

Frosting. After it's melted add about 2 cups of icing sugar. I put mine in bit by bit, about 1/4 cup at a time.

The end result. Delish.