Showing posts with label Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Tutorial: Heart-Shaped Cake

Matt was gone for five days earlier this week, to visit some old friends and attend a memorial for that dear child that I was telling you about. His absence coincided with what will ideally be the last of the unpleasant wintry weather that we'll see until next winter, and so our time without him wasn't what I'd call super-fun, exactly.

Sydney, acting out proven coping methods for her gender, requested that we bake a different sweet together just about every day. We baked muffins, and vegan cocoa fudge cookies, and, with pretty much the last dregs of the pantry supplies, a heart-shaped cake.

You can use any standard cake recipe for a heart-shaped cake. I used the 1-2-3-4 cake from The Art of Simple Food, with an absurd number of substitutions due to the oddness of our pantry (I try to shop only every other week now, due to the oddness of our budget, you could say, so it's typical for recipes to turn odd after a week or so). Let's see...I actually used the eggs that the recipe called for, even though I don't normally eat eggs, because Matt eats them and he wasn't home TO eat them. Instead of milk I used the rest of the organic cow's milk yogurt and then the rest of the soy yogurt--together they came to exactly the right amount, yay! Instead of cake flour I used organic, unbleached all-purpose flour. Instead of the butter I used the rest of the homemade Mason jar butter that the girls and I made earlier last week, and Earth Balance.

Phew!

Despite the way it sounds, the cake came out excellent--perhaps slightly on the dry side, which made it perfect for picking up and eating out of hand, which we all prefer, anyway.

The real trick to baking a heart-shaped cake is to divide the recipe, and bake the cake in both a square pan and a round pan:
The length of the side of the square pan should be equal to the diameter of the round pan, although it can be a little smaller, if you just don't have the right pans--for instance, I bake these cakes in a square 8" casserole dish and a round 9" cake pan. I'll show you how to trim the cake later if you do that.

The other option is to bake the square part of the cake in a rectangular cake pan and just cut it down, but that method wastes some cake, and this method won't.

Cut the round cake exactly in half:

Turn the square cake so that it's a diamond, with a point down and a point up. Put the flat side of each half-circle against one of the top sides of the diamond:
Heart-shaped cake! If the round cake was slightly larger than the square cake, then set each half-circle down independently, lined up correctly at the bottom, and trim the top straight up, the way that I did in the above photograph. If your round cake is the smaller one, though, you'll mess up all the proportions, so just don't do that.

I made a batch of vegan buttercream frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World--don't shame me, but I was almost out of Earth Balance and I didn't have cow's milk butter, so I used Crisco from the can that I'm saving to make soap with! I don't regret it, though--that icing was perfectly white and pure-looking, and took food coloring gorgeously. I divided the frosting and let the girls each choose two colors--Willow chose purple and green, and Sydney chose two colors of pink that were practically identical, and refused to let me darken either one even a little.

Then, basically, I got out of their way:
 
 
 A perfectly-decorated cake!
Obviously, you're meant to frost over the gaps in the cake so that they don't show, but I think that the way that the girls chose to decorate their cake was both charming...

And delicious:
And because it's really two cakes, there are plenty of leftovers!

Friday, January 21, 2011

My New Kitchen Aid

My mother-in-law, noticing that I cook with the girls nearly every day (and also, likely, noticing that the recipes that I cook with the girls are inevitably shockingly elaborate, outrageously messy, and have had a seriously detrimental effect on the state of my kitchen and my emotional health), took pity on me and bought me a new toy for Christmas:
Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes for Cupcakes that RuleI have owned my new Kitchenaid mixer for approximately five days now, and so far the girls and I have used it to make vegan strawberry cake, four loaves of bread dough, and the vanilla cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, complete with the vegan "buttercream" frosting, also made with my new Kitchenaid mixer:
Yum:
Yum!
and YUM!!!!!!!
This afternoon, my Kitchenaid and I are going to mix up some meringue, because baked Alaska doesn't just bake itself, you know.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups: Good, but Not Reese's Good

First of all:
Suck it, Will Shortz! I OWN you on Mondays! The rest of the week...let's not discuss it right now.

So I've been wanting to try Alicia Silverstone's chocolate peanut butter cups for a while now. They're vegan, and she said that they're better than Reese's. Y'all, seriously. She SAID that. And they're VEGAN!

I already knew there were delicious vegan desserts in the world. There's after all, and my dear friend Mac's tofu peanut butter icebox pie to consider. Thanks to Vegan Lunch Box, I make a mean, and delicious, chocolate brownie that's sweetened entirely with pureed fruit and some maple syrup, and my fantasy life revolves around an entire cookbook filled with nothing but such wonders, but these vegan chocolate peanut butter cups...they're good and all, but they didn't so much wow me.

You start with the cutie little cupcake liners:
I bought these at Daiso back in August. Aren't they cuuuuuute? I have no idea what the Japanese on them says--it's probably something filthy.

Then you make the peanut butter filling, and you put that in:
Mine is so dark because the filling is half graham cracker crumbs, and I have chocolate graham crackers left over from chocolate graham cracker haunted houses. That's packrattitude for you (I totally just made that up!)

Finally, you spread the melted chocolate/soy milk mixture on top:It looks crazy yummy, right? And it is good. I think I'm just mad because Alicia Silverstone SAID that they were better than Reese's, and so I was all, "Mmmm, I'm going to eat these, and they're going to be better than Reese's, but not as bad for me, and also vegan!"

That's not how it happened. But the kids adore them, at least:Because, you know, it's so hard to get kids to eat chocolate and peanut butter mixed with sugar.


I think that I'll make a curry tomorrow.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Felted Wool Cupcakes--I'm Obsessed!

Today was Willow's first day of summer vacation back here at home, and so we spent the morning riding the bus to the library for storytime and a craft, playing in the playroom, picking out books, getting lectured by a really mean librarian at the Circulation Desk because Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes for Cupcakes that Rule and are overdue (seriously, you should have to pay the fine OR listen to a lecture, not both), eating a picnic lunch outside by the bear statues, and riding the bus home, and then the afternoon playing outside, stringing beads for necklaces, reading a thousand books, playing Dinosaur Bingo, walking to the playground, walking home in the rain, playing outside in the rain, reading more books, cooking macaroni and cheese for dinner, eating dinner, taking a bath, and watching a Trout Fishing in America DVD. As Willow is laying on the study floor drawing a picture and I am cajoling her into getting ready for bed, she says, "I wish summer vacation was over. It's boring." Sigh.

So while Matt was bathing the girls, I stitched together yet another felted wool cupcake. I am obsessed! I don't know how many felted cupcakes the girls really need to have in their pretend food collection, but I do know that I've got at least another half dozen laid out on the study table to cut out and stitch up. But come on, they're sooooooo cute:
I thought they needed a little something, so I tried adding bows...I dunno. Tips if you're going to make these, though:
  • Cut the cupcake wrapper at an angle so that the bottom comes out narrower than the top, since real cupcake wrappers look like that, not straight cylinders.
  • If you're making these for kids, skip the part in the instructions that asks you to glue the bottom of the cupcake wrapper on. It's not noticeable, and obviously much sturdier, if you hand-stitch it.
  • If you're making these for kids, also forget the part where you stick pretty straight pins into the frosting as decoration--seriously, no. I'm thinking about stitching beads on for the same effect.

And, of course, here's the action shot, in which you can see my lovingly crafted felted wool cupcakes at play:

"Look, Momma! Cupcake smashes the other cupcakes, and then they fall over, and then the cupcake shots them. Shot! Shot! Shot!" Sigh.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Cupcakes, Dinosaurs, Pink Chucks, and Arkansas

Since it's craft fair season, obviously I've been spending almost all my time this week working not on record bowls, T-shirt quilts, and melted crayon hearts, but on cupcakes, dinosaurs, pink Chucks, and Arkansas.

The girls and I have been way into , which I swear is, along with my other great favorite, , the only cookbook I have ever cooked from in which what I cook actually comes out even remotely similar to the photo in the book, and even remotely delicious (I'm a disastrous cook, with a near-manic tendency to make ill-advised substitutions and a certainty that all measurements are only approximate). So far we've made the chocolate mint cupcakes twice and Matt has made, of all things, the margarita cupcakes with them once. Margarita cupcakes? Awesome.

I've also been, during Sydney's precious afternoon naptimes, watching Dexter - The First Season on Netflix and making the girls a bunch of the felted wool cupcakes I found in . They stopped looking like cupcakes to me once I got deep into making them, the same as when you say a word over and over again it loses all meaning, but out of the three I've made so far, there's one that even I'll admit is just darn cute.

And then there are the dinosaurs--I promised the girls a dinosaur quilt this summer, and I am darn well going to deliver a dinosaur quilt, so for a couple of days I put the iron and the dishtowel in semi-permanent residence on the livingroom table (I got so used to intoning, every time I heard little feet thud by, "Don't touch the iron. The iron is hot," that I started even warning Matt as he went by. This is similar to, when I'm laying out a quilt on the livingroom floor, my intonations of "Don't step on the quilt. Walk around the quilt") and knocked out these sweet babies: I'm not a hundred percent happy with the frame conceit, and I doubt that I'll do another one just that way, but hey, it's dinosaurs. The more, the merrier.

The vegan cupcakes are ostensibly a rehearsal for the girls' big summer birthday bash next month, and one of the things I've been trying to do all month, only it keeps raining two out of three days, is take a photo of the girls in their matching candy pink Converse Chuck Taylors to put on the invitation. Finally, a break in the weather, and I managed to find matching socks for everyone, and I only once had to fiercely threaten Willow with not going to dance class if she didn't sit down for this picture for five minutes (I know, I know, but usually I am the kind of mother you don't want to call Social Services about), and I got this photo:

It's so cute it kind of makes me feel sick to my stomach a little. Of course, I cropped off the part where they're sitting with dirty faces cramming their mouths with Quorn nuggets and pineapple.

In upcoming news, today is Willow's last day of school for the summer--I blew her mind yesterday by informing her that when she comes back to school in August, she'll be a MIDDLE-GROUPER! (As opposed to the Youngest Group and the Kindergartners, the other kiddos in her class for those of you not in tune with Montessori lingo). So after school, and after dance class, and after stopping by a party for my friend Tim, who has just successfully defended his dissertation (I sigh, because I can no longer attain the academic single-mindedness it takes to get a PhD), we're all trekking down to Arkansas for the long Memorial Day weekend. Papa and my mother have been talking about taking the girls to McDonald's for their collective birthdays, and hopefully the city pool will be open, and I'm eager to look through my Mama's collection of old recipe books from the various elementary schools and churches she was involved in throughout her life, a collection that is both beloved to me and awesome in its ingredients and preparation methods (7up cake! Jello molds! Oleo!). Willow and Sydney are begging to take their new favorite toy, which Matt bought for them at Goodwill for five dollars on Sunday. That favorite toy is this:
Whew! What did you do this week?