Chocolate and Strawberry Cupcakes

Don’t make these unless you want to eat the most awesome thing ever. I’m warning you now.

Apart from the fact that they’re utterly fantastic, these can quite easily be made gluten and/or dairy free. Also egg free, so they’re vegan-friendly. Also, no electric mixer required. Like I said – fantastic (with or without gluten - I've tried both versions and they're equally delectable).

I got the cake recipe from Group Recipes (ßsee post here). I’ve added my tweaks below (doesn’t necessarily improve it, that’s just the way I did it!).

Ingredients (makes a neat 12)

1.5 cup plain flour OR gluten-free plain flour

1 cup brown sugar

Generous 1/4 cup cocoa powder (usually gluten free but check if making GF)

1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup canola oil OR olive oil (either works)

teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon vinegar (I just used white vinegar because that’s what I had!)

1 cup water

1.     Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Line 12 cup muffin/cupcake pan.

2.     Sift together the dry ingredients.

3.     Add the oil, vanilla, vinegar, and water. Mix together till smooth.

4.     Pour into lined muffin cups. Bake about 25 minutes (test to see if a skewer comes out clean).

5.       When the cupcakes are cool, I suggest scooping a chunk out of the centre of each one and spooning in some strawberry jam (about a teaspoon-ish), then replacing the cake chunk. The jam will kind of soak in, and it doesn’t matter if the surface looks messy if you’re icing over the top anyway.

6.       Use whatever kind of chocolate icing that suits you. But if it needs to be dairy free, try mixing together the following…

• 65 grams of Nuttelex
• 1.5-2 cups of icing sugar
• 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
• A little hot or boiling water as needed to achieve good texture (the heat makes it easier to incorporate the Nuttelex)

7.       Pipe or spread the icing onto the cupcakes. Then decorate with slivers or chunks of fresh strawberry.

  

 Try not to eat them all by yourself… unless that was your plan all along.

Hummingbird Cupcakes, Muesli Muffins and Mini Quiches

Another mish-mash blog post.

I had some very ripe bananas and a tin of pineapple in the pantry so I had a go at hummingbird cupcakes. I needed them to be gluten and dairy free, so used this recipe and just substituted regular flour with gluten free. It worked OK, but I'm still not sold on that grainy texture you get from the gluten free flour, and as yet I've been too lazy to look into ways to avoid it!

I put some crushed pineapple and some juice into the icing to make it a little bit tart. Seemed to go OK.

For Mother's Day brunch celebrations I made muesli muffins using this recipe. I felt these were a bit bland, but I'd say that's mostly because I'm used to cupcakes, which are obviously a lot sweeter. These are quite nice as a snack anyway (especially warmed up with a little butter or margarine) and relatively healthy. I opted to use grated carrot instead of apple, so if I wanted to boost the sweetness I'd probably make sure I had the apple handy!

Mother's Day picnic also saw some more quiche, this time in mini form (post on the dinner sized version is here). I like the flexibility of quiche in that you can basically put in any fillings you fancy or have handy to use up. For this lot I used grated zucchini, a little diced onion, bacon and corn.

Mish mash over and out.