Vegan Chocolate Amaretto Cupcakes

Chocolate and amaretto go so well together.

Rich, dark, silky chocolate and sweet, smooth amaretto.

I adapted this cupcake recipe and this frosting recipe to achieve this flavorful but not-too-boozy recipe.

Vegan Chocolate Amaretto Cupcakes

Makes 18 cupcakes

Ingredients

3/4 cup non-dairy milk

1/4 cup amaretto (plus more for dipping)

1 cup natural cane sugar

1/3 cup canola oil

1 tbsp apple cider vinegar

1 tbsp pure vanilla extract

1/2 tsp pure almond extract (optional, but awesome)

1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1/3 cup cocoa powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp sea salt

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350F and line a cupcake pan with cupcake liners. With an electric mixer, beat together the following ingredients in a large bowl: non-dairy milk, amaretto, oil, sugar, apple cider vinegar, vanilla, and almond extract. Beat on medium speed for a minute or two.
2. Now sift in the dry ingredients: flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. Mix well, until the clumps are gone.
3. Spoon the batter into prepared cupcake pan, about two-thirds full for each. Bake for about 22 minutes at 350F, or until the cupcake slowly springs back when pressed with a finger. Allow to completely cool before dipping the cupcake tops into a small bowl of amaretto and frosting.

For a bit more boozy cupcakes, dip the cooked and cooled cupcake tops in a little bit of amaretto before frosting.

Vegan Chocolate Amaretto Frosting

Makes enough frosting to top 24 cupcakes

Ingredients

1 cup vegan margarine, room temperature

1/4 cup amaretto

4 cups powdered sugar, sifted

1/2 cup coco powder

1/2 Tablespoon cornstarch, sifted

1/2 teaspoon salt

almond slivers to garnish

Method

1. Beat the margarine using an electric mixer until fluffy.

2. Add the sugar, cornstarch and salt then beat for 3 minutes more.

3. Pour in the amaretto then beat for another 5 minutes or until the frosting is light and fluffy.

4. Pipe or spread the frosting on to your cakes as desired.

Perfect for birthdays, picnics and BBQs.

 

I hope everyone back home has had a great Memorial Day. I spent the morning at school then went out to lunch along the Rhine with a group of my girl friends. A lovely way to spend a hot, late spring day!

Tonight I’m going to a bar called Spleen to listen to Andrew Vladeck, a singer and songwriter from New York who’s stopping in Bonn on his European tour.

Should be a good night, I’ll tell you more tomorrow!

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Fluffy Vegan Cupcakes

Although I’ve not mentioned it here, this year I have given up purchasing and cooking with (almost) all animal products for Lent.

I still use organic milk, but only a splash in my morning coffee. That’s it.

This absence of animal products explains the sudden influx of vegan recipes on the blog.

To be honest, I’ve been having a lot of fun trying new vegan recipes. I don’t necessarily miss anything, not even cheese, as the recipes have been so full of flavor on their own.

Giving up animal products created an interesting dilemma when it came to baking birthday cakes for my friend, Kate. I wanted to maintain the birthday baking tradition but didn’t want to sacrifice my commitments to either vegan baking or providing delicious treats.

Last year, I made Kate the most popular recipe on my blog, Lexie’s Healthy Carrot Cupcakes.

Although these cupcakes are delicious and one of my favorites, they are made with eggs, butter and cream cheese.

Luckily, there are so many talented vegan bloggers that the search for a birthday cake replacement was easy.

First up, I visited my favorite vegan blogger, Angela, and her inspiring blog, ohsheglows.com.

I immediately decided to bake her Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes which I’d already saved on my Recipe Wish List.

These cupcakes were so easy to throw together and they rose up gorgeously.

My new favorite chocolate cake, regardless of dietary standards! Do yourself a favor and please, go and try this recipe now!

Knowing that not everyone likes chocolate cake (gasp!) I was on the prowl for a vegan vanilla version and stumbled on a recipe for Vegan Vanilla Agave Cupcakes from the book, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, reposted on happylittlevegans.com.

This was another fast recipe that came together in a cinch but ultimately, I prefer the chocolate cake!

There was just enough batter left of both the chocolate and vanilla cupcakes to make two marbled cakes as well.

These were the taste-test samples.:)

  Heck, yes! After much frosting contemplation, I decided to combine the vegan frosting ideas from both here and here to create my own recipe below.

Topping delicious, individual cakes with fluffy vanilla frosting might be enough for some, but not for me!

Kate’s birthday provided the perfect excuse to try a technique I read about on another favorite blog, Annie’s Eats.

Several weeks ago, Annie wrote a beautiful post on How to make dried pineapple flowers.

I followed her guide exactly up until the very end.

Rather than drying the pineapple then placing the slices in the muffin tin to harden over night, I went ahead and put the dried slices in the muffin tin then tossed them back in the oven to continue to dry while forming the flower shape.

    Oh so delicate and feminine!

The vanilla cupcakes were topped with pineapple flowers, but the chocolate cupcakes received the strawberry treatment.

Strawberries always add that gorgeous pop of color!

The frosting recipe made enough to top 24 cupcakes and three snackable strawberries.

Yummy!

After a day of creating, the cupcakes were all packed up and ready to go!

We went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Maya. Although the food wasn’t very authentic, it was still good. The service, however, was dreadful. Oh well, at least we were with good friends, celebrating the life of a wonderful person and had cakes to eat!

Life is good.

We had good fun dancing the night away before coming home very late. Losing an hour with the time change didn’t help much either! Good fun was had by all!

Happy Birthday, Kate!

Vegan Vanilla Buttercream Frosting

Makes enough frosting to top 24 cupcakes

Ingredients

1 cup vegan margarine, room temperature

3 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted

1/2 Tablespoon cornstarch, sifted

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2- 2 Tablespoons soy creamer

Method

1. Beat the margarine using an electric mixer until fluffy.
2. Add the sugar, cornstarch and salt then beat for 3 minutes more.
3. Pour in the vanilla and creamer then beat for another 5 minutes or until the frosting is light and fluffy.
4. Pipe or spread the frosting on to your cakes as desired.

If you’d like to try any of the other recipes or techniques, please visit these sites.

Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes.

Vegan Vanilla Agave Cupcakes 

How to make dried pineapple flowers.

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Vanilla Sugar Cookies

Valentine’s Day was made extra sweet with the addition of the sugar cookies I made for my students, colleagues and of course, my Love, Sebastian.

The idea for these sweet cookies came from a beautiful post at Annie’s Eats.

Although my cookie cutter was much smaller than hers, I tried to recreate the adorable marbled designs she used.

This was my first attempt using royal icing and marbling but I was really pleased with the results.

I adapted a sugar cookie recipe from Annie’s Eats as well.

What can I say, when someone does it right, there’s no need to go anywhere else.

Annie’s sugar cookie called for almond extract but due to allergies, almond products aren’t allowed at school.

As a result, my cookies were vanilla through and through.

Simple ingredients for delicious cookies.

Cream the butter.

Sift in the powdered sugar.

 Cream together the butter and sugar.

 Beat the egg.

Blend in the egg, vanilla, salt and flour.

It will be hard, but try to keep your fingers out of this buttery, soft, fluffy dough.

Flatten the dough into an even layer and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate dough until it’s firm. I left my dough in the fridge overnight and baked the cookies the next morning.

Prepare your work surface and chilled dough.

Roll your dough out on a well-floured surface. I broke my dough into two batches and it worked well for me.

You want the dough to be about 1/4 inch thick. The thickness of the dough at this point will be the same thickness of the baked cookie.

Start cookie cutting.

 Squeeze them in.

This may be my new favorite photo.

  Bake the cookies for about 8 minutes, you want to remove them from the oven before they golden. 

Allow the cookies to cool slightly on the pan before moving them to a cooling rack.

Cooled cookies.

Space out the cookies, getting ready to frost.

Since I went through frosting the cookies earlier, I’ll just share the photos and a quick caption here.

If you want to learn about the eggless royal icing I used or how to marble the cookies, please visit this post.

Outline the cookies.

Flood the inside with pink icing and marble with white icing and a toothpick.

Just be careful that you don’t over-flood the cookies or they will look a bit psychedelic.

Ingredients:
1 cup butter
1 cup powdered sugar
1 egg, beaten
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. salt
2 ½ cups sifted flour

Directions:
Cream butter. Sift in the powdered sugar and whip with the butter. Blend in egg, vanilla, salt and flour. Chill dough until firm. Roll to ¼” thickness on a well-floured surface. Cut with cookie cutters. Place on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake at 375° F for 8-10 min. Cookies should not brown. Frost and decorate when cool.

I heart these cookies.

Looking good and tasting good, what more could you want?

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Sugar Cookie Sunday

Today started in a sweet way and has only gotten sweeter.

French toast with fried bananas, coconut butter and maple syrup. Oh my word, this is the way to eat French toast.

Yesterday I made both sugar cookie and chocolate sugar cookie dough. I’ll do separate posts about those recipes later but for now am going to jump into the cookies.

Short and… sweet!

First I baked the vanilla sugar cookies.I subbed vanilla extract for the almond extract due to allergies at schoo.

After that, the chocolate sugar cookies were baked.

While I was baking the sweet cookies, my sweetie was putting together the new wardrobe we bought at IKEA yesterday.

  He had some help.

Back to the kitchen.

As far as icing goes, I couldn’t find meringue powder so went with an Eggless Royal Icing recipe. I made one batch of plain white icing and then a quadruple batch of hot pink icing.

Eggless Royal Icing

• 1 cup powdered sugar, sifted
• 2 tsp. milk
• 2 tsp. corn syrup
• 1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
• food coloring

1. Using an electric mixer, mix the powdered sugar and milk until smooth.
2. Add the corn syrup, vanilla and food coloring and beat on low speed until very smooth and glistening.

You could easily substitute another milk if you want to go with a vegan version.

Milk and powdered sugar.

Before the final mix. Not pink enough.

That’s it!

Space out the cooled cookies.

Outline with the thick royal icing.

Flood the inside of the cookies with a slightly thinner royal icing.

Add spots of white icing and marble with a toothpick.

Aren’t they pretty?

If only my dishes cleaned themselves, that would be sweet. I hope you have a wonderfully sweet Valentine’s Day.

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Vegan Carrot Cake

Last Saturday, I made a healthy vegan carrot cake for my friend Melanie’s birthday.

For my first attempt at a new approach to a classic, I turned to Mama Pea. Her vegan carrot cake has been on my recipe wish list for ages.

As usual, her recipe was divine! I made very few alterations to the cake recipe but created my own frosting since vegan cheese replacements haven’t made their way to Germany yet.

Steamed carrots waiting to be pureed.

Cream together the carrots, sugars, margarine and vanilla.

  Sift together the dry ingredients and stir into the wet.

Fold in the raisins.

Spread the batter into a prepared cake pan.

Bake and set aside to cool.

   For the frosting, I removed as much liquid as possible from vanilla soy yogurt.

 The yogurt eventually became much thicker.

Unfortunately, at that point, I realized how late I was and stopped taking pictures. The cake was actually delivered to Melanie’s house in two parts: cooling cake and ready frosting.

After a few more hours, I frosted the cake, stuck in some candles and sang happy birthday.

The cake was so moist and delicious. It was eaten with delight by vegans and non-vegans alike. Everyone raved.

Thank you, Mama Pea!

Vegan Carrot Cake with ‘Cream Cheese’ Frosting

Ingredients

• 10 carrots, peeled and chopped into chunks
• 1/3 c. vegan margarine, room temperature
• 1/4 c. unsweetened applesauce
• 1/4 c. unsweetened almond or soy milk (vanilla or plain)
• 1/2 c. packed organic brown sugar
• 2/3 c. organic raw sugar
• 1/2 t. vanilla extract
• 2 Tbsp. ground flax seed
• 1 1/4 c. whole wheat flour (pastry flour is best but regular worked for me)
• 1/2 c. raisins
• 1 t. baking powder
• 1/2 t. baking soda
• 1/2 t. salt
• 1 t. cinnamon
• 1/2 t. ginger
• 1/2 t. nutmeg

Frosting

• 3 T. vegan margarine
• 2 cups vanilla soy yogurt, well drained
• 2 c. powdered sugar

Method

1. Begin to dehydrate the yogurt by straining it for several hours using a mesh strainer and paper towels.
2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a round cake pan with vegan margarine and dust with flour. Steam the carrots until tender then puree in a food processor until smooth.
3. In a large bowl, cream together pureed carrots, margarine, brown sugar, raw sugar, vanilla, applesauce and milk. Stir in the ground flaxseed and set aside.
4. In a smaller bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, adding a little at a time until incorporated. Fold in the raisins.
5. Spread into the prepared cake pan and bake for 25 minutes, or until a toothpick is inserted and comes out clean. Cool completely.
6. Once the yogurt has dripped off the excess liquid, create a bed of paper towels, about 6 towels thick and spread the yogurt on top. Place another pile of paper towels on top and allow to dehydrate even more. The yogurt will become quite thick and ‘cream cheese’ in consistency. Whip together the yogurt, margarine and powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Spread over the cooled cake.

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