Holiday Cupcakes are Here!

Holiday flavors have arrived, all are $15/half dozen. Delivery is available throughout West LA and the South bay for $5 and other parts of LA County for $10.

• Pumpkin Cupcakes with Buttercream Frosting
• Chocolate Cupcakes with Peppermint Frosting (shown)
• Gingerbread Cupcakes with Buttercream Frosting
• Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

MMMMMMMMM!

Halloween is Here and So Are Pumpkins

I have been craving pumpkin for days now and finally made Pumpkin Chocolate Chip cupcakes. I used the recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World but only made six instead of twelve so they could be big muffins. We had them for breakfast and they were yummy! Beware if you are on WeightWatchers one of the muffins is 9 points! So worth it though.

Also Vegan Lemon Blueberry Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World

Also posted are some Halloween Sprinkled cupcakes I whipped up for a client of mine whose daughter is allergic to milk. What a great treat!

Happy Halloween, Cookie.

Pink and White Cupcakes

My customer Carrie purchases these cupcakes for her daughter who is allergic to milk. I make them with rice milk and pink and white sprinkles. Of course they are vegan! She freezes them and defrosts one everytime there is a birthday party so no one is left out. Great idea, great cupcakes!

Cookie's Cupcakes This Week

Yummy Yummy Yummy, everything this week turned out so good - Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes with Creamy Vegan Peanut Butter Frosting, Vegan Lemon Crunch Cupcakes with Vegan Lemon Frosting, Vegan Gluten-Free/Agave Sweetened Cupcakes with Sugar Free Agave Chocolate Frosting. And in the plastic bags - vegan snickerdoodles, vegan chocolate chip cookies and my hot hot item of the month - vegan oatmeal agave flax cookies.

Get them at Planet Earth Eco Cafe in Hermosa Beach, CA!

Yay for cupakes :)

Love, Vicki

Cupcakes with Lots of Sprinkles

Lately I've been having fun with sprinkles of all kinds. Someone asked me to make festive birthday cupcakes so I took my basic vegan vanilla cupcake with vegan buttercream frosting and topped it with a variety of sprinkles and other frosting. I think they turned out great! I also made some red/white/and blue festive Fourth of July cupcakes. It is definitely more yummy to bite into a cupcake that is full of sprinkles :)

Speaking of Martha Stewart - Vegan Coffee Cake Adaptation

I found a crumb cake recipe on Martha Steart's recipe and "veganized" it, as I like to say. The adaptation worked well on my first try! This is so tempting and deliscious. I almost ate all of it, I probably ate half of it and my husband ate the other half. For those of you on a diet, one bite is enough to satisfy your craving for sweet. Here is the recipe - I had issues uploading the picture:

Recipe - Vegan Coffee Cake (adapted from a Martha Stewart recipe)

Cake
2 Cups Unbleached White Flour
3/4 Cup Sugar plus 2 Tbsp Sugar
1 Tbsp Bakign Powder
1 Tsp Salt
1/2 Cup Vegan Margarine (sticks work best)
1 Tsp Cinnamon
1/4 Cup Vanilla Soy Yogurt
3/4 Cup Soy Milk
2 Tbsp Vegan Margarine, Melted

1. Preheat Oven to 350 Degrees and Grease an 8-Inch Square Pan.
2. In a medium bowl or mixer combine flour, 3/4 cup sugar, baking powder, salt.
3. Cut your vegan margarine in little pieces until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Put 1/2 cup of this mixture into a separate bowl. Stire in remaining 2 Tbsp of sugar and cinnamon and set aside.
4. Stir soy yogurt and soy milk into remaining flour mixture.
5. Spoon batter into pan and smooth. Pour melted butter over the top and sprinkle the 1/2 cup of reserved crumb mixture evenly over the top.
6. Bake cake until a toothpick entered into the center comes out clean, approximately 35 minutes. Enjoy warm or at room temperature.

Can be stored at room temperature for 3 days or frozen for three months.

Celebrate Cupcakes This Week...A Little History from Martha Stewart

This is from Martha Stewart's Martha Moments Blog This Week, I Love a History Lesson, Especially About Cupcakes!

Cupcakes originated in the United States in the late 1800s. They were so called because the ingredients for them were measured in cups instead of weighed, as had been the custom. They were first believed to have been called "number cakes" because of a numeric simplicity of the recipe: One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour and four eggs plus one cup of milk and one spoonful of soda. According to "Baking in America" by Greg Patent, this was revolutionary because of the tremendous time it saved in the kitchen. Whether it was a "cup," "measure" or "number" cake, the shift to measuring from weighing was indeed a significant one, according to "The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America." But it goes on to explain that the cup name had a double meaning because of the practice of baking in small containers -- including tea cups. The cups were for convenience because hearth ovens took an extremely long time to bake a large cake -- and early cakes, by the way, were enormous -- and burning was common. Gem pans, early muffin tins, were common in households around the turn of the 20th Century and cupcakes were then baked in those.

http://marthamoments.blogspot.com/2008/03/this-week-is-cupcake-week-on-martha.html

Bake A Perfect (Vegan) Cookie Everytime!

I have spent many many hours working on vegan cookies and have come up with my list of tips and tricks to the perfect vegan cookie:

• I have had good luck using Ener-G Egg Replacer in my recipes in lieu of eggs. Sometimes, if I want an extra fluffy cookie, I add an extra "egg" equivalent.


• Get to know your oven! Some take more or less time than a recipe indicates so this is really important.


• To save energy (and the earth), don't preheat your oven until after your dough is ready (unless your oven takes awhile to preheat). Most ovens take very little time to heat up and this way if you have a complicated recipe you will save on energy and save yourself some money!


• Vegan cookie recipes can be dry. I add water to make it easier to work with. But, I only add One Tablespoon at a time, otherwise the cookies get too watery :).


• Use a cookie or ice cream scoop to place your cookies on the baking rack. It makes your cookies the same size and takes much less time than measuring out tablespoons, rolling the dough, and placing it on the sheet.


• For chewy cookies like snickerdoodles and peanut butter cookies, take the cookies out no later than the maximum time allotted. They might not look done but they will finish cooking on the baking sheet.


• Always cool your cookies on a cookie rack.

And always remember when you're done to put that spatula down, pour yourself a glass of (soy) milk, and enjoy at least one of your cookies :).

Grab a Latte and Cupcake This Week at Planet Earth Eco Cafe

I made these cupcakes for Planet Earth Eco Cafe. It is the first time you will find my cupcakes there. One is a carrot cake cupcake sweetened with pineapple, carrots, maple syrup, and coconut and topped with buttercream frosting and cinnamon...mmm heaven. The other is a lemon cake with crunchy nut butter and the sweetest lemon frosting you have ever tasted. Go get yourself one if they haven't sold out yet!

Planet Earth Eco Cafe is an awesome local coffee shop with organic fair trade coffee and some of the nicest owners you will ever meet. The ambience is warm and friendly and their coffee from lattes to pirate's chai are uncomparable. They are located at 509 Pier AveHermosa Beach, CA 90254.

Baking With Agave Nectar

I just bought a new book - Baking with Agave Nectar, by by Ania Catalano on Amazon.com. The book is fabulous, especially considering my latest obsession is with agave nectar. For Easter brunch I decided to dive in and make my first recipe out of the book. 99.9% of the time I bake cupcakes, because I am obsessed with them but I decided to make the "Peach Melba Cake" recipe. It's vegan, sugar-free, and very tasty! There are three layers to the cake - the bottom a peach cake, the middle a peach custard, then a strawberry topping with a jello-like glaze.

It turned out great (see pictures below). It was very lightly sweetened and very fruity. If I was having a craving for sugar, I could have substituted sugar for agave in the cake but me and my brunch guests (family) loved the lightness of it.