Vegan chocolate cupcakes

Another birthday party-related post... I did quite a lot of baking last weekend!

One of my best friends is vegan and I wanted to make sure there would be cakes at my party that she could eat. I'm relatively new to vegan cooking - because my friend is relatively new to veganism - and when I mentioned my idea for vegan cakes to someone who shall remain nameless (!) she said she imagined they would be tasteless and horrible. So I set out to prove her wrong!

I googled 'vegan cakes' as I really didn't know where to start and found this recipe, though I decided to halve the quantities. The recipe was for a large cake - even though the picture shows cupcakes - and I decided to make it into cupcakes. It was pretty easy to make:

Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, bicarb of soda and salt. Then add sugar.

 

Add vegetable oil, water and vanilla flavouring. And that's it!

Pour into cake cases and bake....

The recipe didn't include any frosting (scandalous!) but that too is pretty easy to make. I had some vegan margarine from a brand named Pure in the fridge from when I did a previous vegan bake for the same friend (which I haven't blogged about yet, but will) and all I did was mix that with some icing sugar and cocoa powder to make dairy-free buttercream.

I piped that on top of the cakes, then for the finishing touch made a green shoe cake topper. I used a small shoe cutter and rolled green fondant (which is vegan, I checked!) and once it had hardened, stood one on top of each cupcake. I did a similar topper but in pink for a different kind of cupcake I had made, so I was able to tell my friend that the ones with the green shoe signified they were vegan :-)

I wasn't sure how it would turn out since it used neither eggs nor butter but the end result was a really lovely moist chocolate cake. Several non-vegans ate these and declared them delicious and the doubter I mentioned at the start of this post had to eat her words - as she ate a cupcake!