vegan cupcakes.

How lovely are these cupcake cases? They were a birthday gift from my friend Amelia. Since she's vegan (and vegans are allowed to enjoy desserts too!) I thought it'd be nice to try out some dairy and egg free baking. We made vegan cupcakes with lemon buttercream and pink, almond flavoured buttercream. 

Shopping list

Makes 12 cupcakes

♥ 200g plain flour

♥ 175ml sweetened almond milk

♥ 150g caster sugar

♥ 90ml coconut oil, warmed until liquid

♥ 2 tsp apple cider vinegar

♥ 1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder

♥ 1 tsp vanilla extract

♥ 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

♥ 1/2 tsp salt

For the buttercream

140g soya "butter"

260g icing sugar

A dash of almond milk

To flavour, I used lemon zest in six of my cupcakes and vegan friendly almond friendly flavouring in the other six.

This is an amalgamation of many vegan baking recipes I found online - which seem to all have a combination of coconut oil, cider vinegar and almond milk. I made the "butter" cream icing in my usual way but with a soya substitute. for the record - Sainsbury's are absolutely brilliant for their free from range!

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees c. Mix together the cider vinegar and almond milk. Whisk together the flour, sugar, salt, bicarb and baking powder. 

Then, melt the coconut oil to a liquid by carefully hovering the bottle over boiling water. We had no idea how to do this especially in a glass bottle. Any pointers?

By now the almond milk and vinegar mix will have curdled - although it looks weird this is actually good! 

Now you're ready to carefully beat the wet and dry ingredients together bit by bit. Add in the vanilla extract here too.

See how the Kenwood has a unique k beater? I'm not sure how much difference it makes other than it is pretty damn good. Lastly divide into the 12 cupcakes - leaving a cm gap at the top. Although, these cupcakes don't rise much and are quite good for a decorating base.

Bake for 15 minutes and no longer - as these cupcakes will stay pale. I did actually overbake these a tad as I was thinking they needed to turn golden like usual cupcake recipes.

Now the buttercream! Which contains no butter and no cream! Slowly mix together the butter and sugar with a dash of milk. 

I then roughly separated the mix in two; adding lemon zest and juice to one half and the other with dr oetker hot pink and vegan friendly almond flavouring.

Our little production line ready to go!

I only had one star shaped nozzle so the yellow lemon ones were iced with a flat nozzle which created a ribbon link effect. I think I preferred the pink ones though.

Ta da! 

Complete with a sugary cup of tea. and this time i actually had some almond milk in my fridge :)

What do you think? Other vegan friendly adventures with Amelia include homemade vegan pasta and pesto. We have lots of cupcake cases left so if you have any recipes do let me know!