Mardi Gras Mayo Cupcakes

I ended up with about a quart of Vegenaise the other day..the bottom of a foodservice jar froze slightly at work and was going to be thrown away..and rather than let it go to waste, I figured I'd take it home and do something with it...despite the fact that I don't like mayo. (I find purple cap Vegenaise to taste better than traditional mayo, but that won't change that I'm still not a mayo person.)

My mom suggested mayo cake, and me being the sweet-tooth monster that I am had already been thinking about that from the moment this large sum of mayo came into my possession. But I wanted to make Mardi Gras cupcakes and make them colored...and mayo cake is chocolate. So they had to be vanilla.

So why is vanilla mayo cake not a thing? (Seriously, google it! They're all chocolate!) Sometimes there just don't seem to be good reasons for things. Why was there no peanut butter tunnel cake either? I just don't know. So I found one internet recipe for vanilla mayo cake and tweaked it a bit...AND IT'S FANTASTIC! These cupcakes rise really high, are very springy, and of course, in the tradition of mayo cake...supermoist!

And since I have all that mayo, I thought I might as well try frosting too...why is there no mayo frosting?? Would it be nasty? Well, I thought I'd find out..and whadda ya know.. IT'S GREAT TOO! It's like cream cheese frosting, but I actually think it's a little better. It even pipes and holds it's shape. No Tofutti or Earth Balance? Try some Vegenaise next time. 

Mardi Gras Mayo Cupcakes

makes 12 full size cupcakes (plus 2 slightly-less-than-full-size)

1 cup grapeseed Vegenaise

1 cup cold almond milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp almond extract

1/4 tsp lemon extract

1 cup sugar

2 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 T cornstarch

food colors (optional)

Preheat oven to 350. Line cupcake tin with paper liners. Beat together mayo and almond milk until smooth. Beat in extracts. Beat in sugar. Beat in dry ingredients. If desired, separate batter into 3 bowls and dye green, purple and gold. Spoon colored batter into liners gently. There's nothing fancy you have to do to get the look in the picture. Spoon in some purple. Gently spoon in gold, then green. Or do them willy-nilly. Bake for 16-19 minutes.

Mayo Frosting

This makes enough to pipe about 1 1/2-2 tablespoons on each cupcake. Double if you want to completely cover each cupcake with a mountain of frosting.

1/2 cup grapeseed Vegenaise

1 tsp vanilla extract

2-4 cups powdered sugar

food colors (optional)

Beat vanilla into mayo. Beat in powdered sugar until desired consistency is reached. (Less sugar if you don't need it to hold it's shape or be piped) Add colors if desired.

Pipe frosting onto cooled cupcakes and top with colored sugar. (Rub some food color into a bowl of sugar with your fingers for DIY colored sugar.)

Some notes: The lemon and almond extracts compliment the tang of the mayo, but you'd probably be ok leaving them out if you don't have them. I'm not sure how other mayos will work in this recipe. I've never had blue cap (original) Vegenaise, but the consensus seems to be that purple cap (grapeseed) Vegenaise tastes much better. In the cupcakes, it might not matter, but it could possibly make a difference in the frosting if your mayo does not taste great on it's own. (Uh, so don't use that jar of nasty-brand vegan mayo that a well-meaning family member accidentally bought you 3 years ago.)

These pictures were taken a day after the cupcakes were made and had been stored unrefrigerated (there's no room in my fridge!) in a plastic container. The color of the frosting changed just slightly (This actually happened within an hour of them being made) and the enclosed moisture made the cupcakes glossy.

accidentally smooshed the forsting on this one in the storage container

The unfrosted ones here are not as big as the others, because they were the last
bits of batter I was trying to stretch. And they're all Jackson Pollock because of that.

Happy Mardi Gras!

Mardi Gras-colored bird, juvenile Honeycreeper

Easy Gluten Free Baked Goods

I got a taste the other day of what it must feel like to be a beginning vegan baker...because the other day I started my journey as a beginning gluten-free baker. It was a bit confusing and I had some questions, but everything ended up turning out mostly ok.

I have been curious about the gluten-free fad for a while, but have always been intimidated by expensive flours of which you need 2 or 3 or 4 of for each recipe, the superexpensive and seemingly necessary xanthan gum, and that a lot of gluten-free recipes make up for the sticky proteiny-ness of gluten with loads of eggs.

I'm no celiac, but if I eat a lot of seitan, I feel like there's a brick sitting in my stomach. My cousin, however, is a celiac and gets insufferably sick when he gets "gutened", as he says. So my cousin's baked good-less holiday and my curiosity for different and challenging things brought me to the next three recipes.

I had a few gf flours in the pantry, mainly cheap things like white rice, potato and tapioca that I get at the Asian market. And I had no intention of buying an $8-$12 bag of anything, including xanthan gum, so I searched and searched to find recipes that didn't use those and were beginner friendly. I decided on "brownies", flourless peanut butter cookies, and the vanilla gluten freedom cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World.

The brownies were the most baffling. I chose them because they only required rice flour and seemed pretty straightforward. I'm not entirely sure the recipe is correct, because it was modified from another...and I think there is too much liquid, but I didn't want to deviate from it with this being my first attempt at a new kind of baking. The original recipe calls for sweet rice flour, so perhaps that makes a difference. Other than upping the sugar, as mentioned, I changed nothing. My rice/water mixture wasn't paste-like, so perhaps I didn't cook it long enough. When the oven timer went off, I checked to find a pan of bubbly boiling chocolate syrup.. There was a little brownie skin in the middle of the pan, but the edges were boiling liquid...So I ended up keeping them in the oven for about and hour and a half until I finally gave up. When I pulled them out, they were still bubbly liquid, but as they cooled, they congealed and turned into something like fudge. And they were actually really good! I just wouldn't call them brownies, and I would use a foil lined or disposable pan next time. And be sure to cut them before they cool completely, or they will be near impossible to remove from the pan. (There was so much baked on stuff, I'm not sure I will ever get the pan clean.) But I would definitely make these fudgethingies again! Maybe I would reduce the water to see if they turn out more brownie-like.

pan of dishwasher doom

squares of gooey fudgey deliciousness

Now the peanut butter cookies are a bit of a cheat because they don't use any gluten-free flours...They don't use any flour at all! Flourless, eggless cookies...hmm...sounds too good to be true, but I had seen several variations of this recipe, which is basically peanut butter, sugar and egg replacer. This recipe uses powdered egg replacer and applesauce. I made the recipe as directed, but using DIY egg replacer instead of Ener-G. You could probably use ground flax with the same (or better?) results. I halved the recipe and got 12 substantial cookies. They are a bit crumbly and super peanut buttery (duh), but amazingly simple. I used the harder solids and some oil from the bottom of a jar of natural peanut butter..I bet the texture would be different (more chewy?) with stir-able peanut butter. Here are some other variations on the recipe.

with arrowroot for egg replacer

with sunflower seed butter and chia seeds

with cashew butter and tofu
these use applesauce and a few tablespoons of flour

I wasn't planning on the cupcakes because they call for quinoa flour which is $8 for a 1 lb box, but when I found cheap millet flour at the Asian market, I figured millet flour would be very similar and would work. The VCTOTW recipe does use four flours (tapioca, corn or almond, white rice and quinoa), which has always intimidated me a bit, but quinoa was the only one I was missing.

not $9!

I chose corn instead of almond to help use up my bag of corn flour that I rarely find uses for, and it definitely left a distinct taste on the cupcakes. Unfrosted, the cupcakes tasted a little like sweet corn muffins. Almond would definitely replicate the gluten free cupcakes from my favorite NYC sandwich shop. In fact, now that I've made the gluten freedom cupcakes, I'm nearly certain that's the recipe they use with almond flour instead of corn.

I decided to half the recipe and make minis, because I didn't want so much to go to waste if I messed it up (although I should know by now, Isa and Terry rarely lead astray with their recipes.) If you didn't know, a cupcake success secret is that minis are a lot more fool-proof than regular sized cupcakes. I figured this out when I had a mini cupcake machine in an oven-less boat I lived in, and was able to sloppily throw together batter with unmeasured ingredients and have the cupcakes still turn out great.

I got 18 minis from the half recipe. I frosted the cupcakes with a buttercream with a tiny bit of cocoa powder for a light chocolatey frosting and rolled them in red sugar. I would definitely make these again for myself..They have a nice texture that isn't pure fluff like white flour cupcakes. I'll try the almond version next, but I am satisfied with the corn one.

look at that beautiful crumb!

So my first gluten-free baking experiences did not make me want to pull my hair out. And I didn't have to buy xanthan gum or multiple $8 bags of flour. And everything didn't fall flat or turn to bricks. It makes my cousin insanely happy to be able to eat homebaked goods, and I enjoy trying new things, so there will likely be more gluten free recipes to come.

Vampire teeth cupcakes with dripping blood

These are kinda funny. Usually I like to use spider rings if I do plastic toppers for Halloween cupcakes, but these red vampire teeth just seemed so fun. 

Here are some mini cupcakes I made with the spider rings last year. I swirled chocolate buttercream with orange tinted Biscoff spread for the frosting.

They were a big hit, but I was getting tired of doing spider rings. Originally I wanted to do chocolate buttercream, but then I realized they would look like mouth-full-of-poop cupcakes, so I went with orange buttercream. Only I didn't have any oranges or orange extract...but I did have..orange Kool-Aid! 

I added a little bit with some food color to the VCTOTW buttercream recipe to get some surprisingly tangy icing.

And what are vampire teeth without fake blood?? So I made some classic movie blood (corn syrup + food color) and added a pinch of cherry Kool-Aid. (A little goes a long way! Add sparingly a tiny bit at a time.)

I didn't have an icing tip with a large opening so I was lazy and just snipped off the corner of a zipper bag and iced that way. The swirls are a little haphazard, but it just adds to their general weirdness. After topping with the blood, they were covered with plastic wrap for the next day. The blood soaked in a little bit, so these are probably best decorated right before being eaten to keep their cool blood effect. 

I made two batches, one using Chloe Coscarelli's chocolate beer cupcakes (Did you know Chloe's dad is Don Coscarelli, the guy who made Phantasm? If you haven't seen Phantasm, it's a great cult horror movie with a kickass theme song.)

and the other batch using the chocolate stout cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes for Cupcakes that Rule . I actually didn't use stout at all, but some light beer that had been left from a party a few weeks back. Honestly I picked those recipes just to get rid of the beer. Chloe's recipe was lighter and very cake mix cake-like, but I slightly preferred the VCTOTW recipe. Not a huge difference between the two though. Chloe's recipe filled one cupcake pan with enough left for about 9-10 mini cupcakes.

I decorated the minis with some skull and bones candies I found at the dollar store.

Listen to the Phantasm theme as you make these guys. It always reminds me of Halloween and scary movies.

Bat photo from baturday

Happy Halloween!