Vegan Cupcakes

Making Vegan Cupcakes is Easy

Vegan cupcakes are quickly becoming sought after, especially as children look to make their birthday parties creative, couples search for cupcake tiers as alternatives to wedding cakes, and party hosts cater for events with light snacks.

For the host, there are often many options regarding vegan cupcakes. Usually if you live in a large city, you’ll be able to find a few restaurants, cafes and cake parlours which make vegan cupcakes. A quick check on an internet search engine will help you find any of these caterers in your area. These sorts of places (especially caterers) can often work with you to create exactly what you want, whether that be a five-tier of cupcakes with detailed white frosting for a wedding, or an array of flavours for a large party, though restaurants often don’t customise cupcakes, either because they can be very busy, or don’t do catering/special orders.

If you want to make vegan cupcakes yourself, you can easily just use a regular cupcake and frosting recipe and veganise the ingredients (eg. using soy milk instead of dairy milk, egg substitute instead of egg, and vegan butter/margarine instead of dairy butter). If you’d rather not veganise a recipe yourself, give this one a go. You might want to experiment with the measurements of each ingredient to tweak the recipe to your liking, but use this as a fairly clear guide.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon apple cider
• 1 ½ cups milk (try soy or rice milk, flavoured if you like)
• 2 ½ cups flour
• ½ cup cocoa powder (optional; for chocolate cupcakes)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup sugar (bearing in mind to use white sugar refined in Australia  as many overseas producers refine their sugar with bone char; this is not vegan)
• ½ cup oil (choose the type of oil you use, just make sure it’s suitable for cooking. eg. no flaxseed oil!)

Making the Cupcakes...

1. Preheat your oven to 180° Celsius.
2. Stir apple cider and soymilk in a bowl. The mixture will curdle; this is normal and should be happening.
3. In another bowl, stir the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder and baking soda.
4. Stir the vanilla extract and oil into the apple cider and soymilk mixture.
5. Combine the dry ingredients and wet ingredients in one bowl. Beat with an electric hand-held beater or by hand.
6. Pour the mixture into a muffin tray. Approximately ¼ cup of the mixture should be poured into each muffin mould in the tray. For larger cupcakes, pour ½ cup of mixture into each muffin mould, but use a larger muffin tray.
7. Bake for approximately 20 minutes. If you can smell the cupcakes, check that they aren’t browning. If they are; they’re most likely ready.
8. Allow the pan to cool before removing from the oven.
9. Remove cupcakes from the muffin tray and place on a wire rack to cool.

If you want to add icing to your vegan cupcakes, then give this little recipe a try.

Vegan Cupcakes Frosting (Chocolate)

Ingredients

• ¼ cup vegan butter/margarine
• ½ cup shortening
• ½ cup cocoa powder
• 2 ½ cups powdered sugar
• 1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
• ¼ milk (try soy or rice milk)

1. Cream the butter/margarine and shortening. Make sure they have mixed well.
2. Add cocoa powder and mix well.
3. Add sugar in ½ cup portions and beat well, adding a splash of soy/rice milk each time.
4. Add vanilla extract and beat until mixture is well mixed and fluffy.

If you don’t want your frosting to be chocolate flavoured; just leave out the cocoa powder. The recipe for frosting will still work fine; it will still be sweet and tasty, just not chocolate flavoured.