What The Hell Does A PinkHairedGirl Eat?

Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.

Inspired by these guys and the Ace of Cakes episode where they make a Lost cake, I decide to have a bunch of friends over and decorate Lost themed cupcakes. (We were consoling ourselves over the fact that we have to wait 8 months or something until there’s new Lost.) You can see all of the ones we made on my boyfriend’s flickr.

This was awesome nerdy, sugary fun. I just made the cupcakes & some ganache and frosting and let everyone go to town. We used plastic baggies for piping and chopsticks to kind of poke at things. Probably not as awesome as if we had fancy piping bags, but I think they still turned out awesome. I was amazed by my friend’s artistic skills and freakish Lost trivia knowledge. Cupcake decorating party = awesome!

PS. Yes, I made 3 dozen cupcakes in 1 week. Don’t judge me!

from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World

I was going to a dinner party that Beany from The Middle Way was hosting, and so I made these cupcakes to bring along. I just made the regular vanilla cupcakes from VCTOW, but I cut up a bunch of strawberries and stuck them into the tops of the cupcakes before I put them into the oven. (I did this because I was afraid if I stirred them into the batter they would all sink to the bottom, but it actually caused me to make giant cupcakes with sort of a muffin top thing going on, so next time I’m just going to stir them in.) This turned out really well, I’m totally going to experiment with more fruit in cupcakes.

I dyed the frosting pink using beets! I’ve been saving my beet parings in my freezer for just this sort of occasion, so I microwaved a couple of bits of beet peel with the soymilk for the frosting for 5 seconds, and then let it sit and seep for a while. It totally worked! I’m so proud of my hippie pink food dye.

Beany made an amazing spread with curried potatoes and homemade chappatis and tofu and rice & veggies. I got to taste her homemade chili sauce and it was spicy & fantastic. It was all amazingly delicious and I ate way too much. I barely had room for a cupcake afterward!

Local: Cupcakes

Vanilla Cupcakes with Vegan Buttercream from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World

It was my friend Mike’s birthday, so being a good friend I made him some cupcakes. And being a mean, terrible person I wrote “Mike is old!!!” on them in strawberry letters. Fortunately, he took it gracefully and enjoyed the cupcakes, if not their message. The only problem I had with these is that the strawberries started to bleed a little after they’d been on the cupcakes a while – I guess they’re not the best medium for cupcakes messages after all. Next time I’ll stick with frosting.

Local: Strawberries

recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World

I promised my boyfriend that if he bought me this pan I would use it to bake him a cake, and he bought it for me that very day, going to the mall and everything. Then I didn’t make him a cake until two or three weeks later, because I am a terrible girlfriend.

This is the first cake I’ve made using this pan, and it turned out a little wonky. I doubled the cupcake recipe, but I probably should have tripled it, as I didn’t have enough batter to fill the pan all the way, and the shapes came out a little wonky. The cake also turned out a little dry around the edges – next time I’ll cook it at a lower temperature.

However, so far the giant cupcake seems to be a hit. This is recreation of one of the cupcake variations I made for the boyfriend’s last birthday, so I knew he would like it. All of my friends seemed suitable impressed, or at least willing to eat cake. So now I just need to work on creating the perfect giant cupcake.

from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World

I made these cupcakes for election night. Which, again, shows you just how behind I am in posting things. Anyway, they’re just the vanilla cupcakes with buttercream frosting, but I made the frosting red, white and blue to demonstrate my patriotic spirit. My boyfriend ate about six of these, because he is very patriotic and possibly has some sort of buttercream frosting addiction.

from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World

Aren’t the agave nector cupcakes pretty? I love how they got all golden brown around the edges.

from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World

It was my roommate’s birthday, so of course I had to make him some cupcakes. I liked these cupcakes a lot, but the frosting turned out kind of sticky and weirdly chewy. My roommate said it tasted like something that would be in a hostess snack. I blame my soymilk powder, since this seems to happen anytime I use it in frosting. I decorated the cupcakes with some store bought frosting I had bought to decorate a cake with and then never used.

I wrote “Yay, Brian!!!” on them (if you couldn’t tell), but then my boyfriend came over and ate the N cupcake and claimed that he “hadn’t realized they had writing on them” and that “it looked like squiggles.” (Fortunately, this was after Brian had seen the cupcakes, so it wasn’t a big deal.) We rearranged the cupcakes to spell different things as they got eaten – my favorite was when Brian flipped the A and the Y upside down to make “∀ λ”, or “For all lambda” in math talk. (we are nerds.)

from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World

I think I’ve finally figured out how to make a really good ganache: whisk the fuck out of it, and then let it cool down for ten-to-fifteen minutes. It turns out smooth, thick, and not all crazy drippy. (Although still a little crazy drippy.) These are my all time favorite cupcakes to make when I am too lazy to make buttercream frosting, and since I was making both ganache and chocolate cupcakes for the peanut butter bombs anyway, they seemed perfect. They were also very tasty with raspberries on top. They were not quite the rockstars that the peanut butter bombs were, but they were good enough that my boyfriend ate three in one day when I left the leftover ones at his house.

from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World

I just could not get the right texture going in the sugar syrup for the recipe. Maybe it was because it was ungodly hot, but no matter how thick I made it the syrup wanted to start dissolving and sinking into the cupcakes almost as soon as I dribbled it on. It pretty much completely disappeared between when I took this picture and when I served the cupcakes. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, actually, since I have to admit that sometimes when I look at that picture I think “Cupcake Cumshot.” (That’s also totally the name of my punk band that sings songs about baking.) I really love the fresh berries and cupcakes combo, though, I definitely have to start doing that more, I’ll just leave the syrup business off in the future.

I have to admit that the cupcakes were not actually as good as the fatty kind of cupcakes – they seemed denser and didn’t have as light a crumb going on. (One of my friends who makes a lot of cupcakes from VCTOW noticed, too, she was like “Are these gluten free or something?” and I was like “No, low fat.”) Still tasty, but not as nice in texture. Also, props to my roommate for hooking me up with some applesauce after I realized mine had gone all moldy.

from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World

I made three dozen cupcakes for my boyfriend’s birthday, just to prove how much I dig him. (It had nothing to do with how awesome cupcakes are, that part was all pure suffering.) These were probably the most awesome of the bunch. They’re a variation on the chocolate cupcakes from VCTOW. I was like, “I took peanut butter, and made it super, duper bad for you.” Yes, that frosting is peanut butter plus shortening, margarine and powdered sugar, which is pretty ridiculous. I think these would be super good if you could get sort of a hard chocolate shell going over the peanut butter, like that magic shell stuff.

from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World

I used almond meal instead of hazelnut meal because I had some in the cupboard, but no one was all “ZOMG WRONG NUT” so it turned out okay. I also bought the wrong kind of silken tofu, but again, no one was “ZOMG WRONG TOFU.” These were super tasty, with the hazelnut on hazelnut action, and also an attractive dark brown color.

Have I mentioned I totally made my boyfriend eat one of each kind of cupcake so I could try a bite of each them? That is just how high maintenance I am.