Vegan Valentine’s Day Cookies n’ Cream Cupcakes

Makes 10 cupcakes.

Cupcake Recipe:

1 cup soy milk

1 tsp apple cider vinegar

1/3 cup canola oil

2 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 cup sucanat (What is this? Read above!)

1 cup cake and pastry flour

1/3 cup cocoa powder (I used Dutch-processed, but regular would be fine)

10 Oreo cookies, chopped

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350 F and line a muffin pan with liners.

In a large bowl, whisk the soy milk and vinegar together and let it sit for 3-5 minutes to curdle. Stir in the remaining liquid ingredients.

In the bowl of a stand mixer (preferably… you could stir by hand or use a handheld electric mixer), sift the dry ingredients together, EXCEPT for the cookie bits. Add the wet ingredients in two batches and beat until mostly smooth (a few tiny lumps won’t hurt). Stir in the cookie bits until evenly distributed.

Fill liners 3/4 full and bake 18-20 minutes. Cool completely  before frosting.

Buttercream Recipe

For those of you looking for a precise buttercream recipe, you won’t find it here. What I will give you is the know-how to make enough buttercream to ice these cupcakes perfectly.

In the bowl of your electric mixer add:

3 tbsp vegan margarine

1/4 cup soy milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 tsp professional red food dye (make sure it’s vegan… not all are) or up to 2 tsp of Club House or other grocery store variety dye. A good, natural alternative would be to use a little beet juice or raspberry juice INSTEAD of dye and soy milk.

Add 2 cups of icing sugar. Beat with mixer until smooth. Slowly add anywhere between 1-2 additional cups of icing sugar, 1/4 of a cup at a time, until the desired consistency is reached. The more intricate your icing pattern is, the stiffer your icing needs to be.

I used a 1M cake decorating tip and a piping bag to frost these cupcakes.

Decorations

I used an assortment of cake sprinkles to decorate the cupcakes. I piped melted vegan chocolate chips (PC The Decadent Semisweet Chocolate Chips available at Loblaws, Superstore, and Extra Foods) onto a sheet of parchment on a cookie sheet to make the chocolate decorations. A fancy tip is not required to do this; simply cut a small hole in the end of the bag. Start with a small hole and remember that you can always make it bigger. I froze the decorations to make them easy to handle when it was time to top the cupcakes.

When using chocolate to make decorations, be sure to make a few extra; they can be quite fragile and you may break some when handling them.

How did I melt the chocolate? In a plastic, disposable piping bag, on medium-low heat in the microwave. When you see the chips starting to melt, stop the microwave and squish the chips around in the bag to melt. Put them back in the microwave and repeat until the last chips melt as you squeeze the bag. Keep the chocolate in the microwave for as little time as possible.

Variation:

Could you use granulated and/or brown sugar instead of sucanat? I would think so, but haven’t tried it. If you give it a shot, please comment and let me know how it worked out!

Recipe from Morselsminus.wordpress.com Photo from Morselsminus.wordpress.com