After complaining about my last slightly disappointing batch of eggless cupcakes on Twitter, Monnie (who has even more websites than me and is studying pattisserie at the moment) sent me her vegan cupcake recipe. I might ask her if it’s okay for me to post it on this blog later Take a look at the recipe on MonnieCakes -  the general gist is to use bicarb soda and vinegar to get the rising and emulsifying effect that would normally come from egg in the mixture.

just out of the oven

Having never successfully made cupcakes before (not sure what about it I seem to struggle with…), these are probably the best I’ve ever made. Maybe if I had a side-by-side comparison I could taste the difference between cupcakes with eggs and these eggless ones, but based purely on memory they taste just as good to me. The blueberries tended to bleed a little on the sides which makes it a tad messy to eat, but I think they’re pretty tasty!

experimenting with icing

I topped them off with some cream cheese icing (which I’ve decided is more to my taste than buttercream) and blueberries. Experimented a little with presentation, but still not sure what works best – 1 blueberry looks a little lonely, 2 looks like eyes, and 3 is a bit crowded on the mini muffin size cupcakes. More experimenting and tasting is required!

I love cake. I love eating it, looking at it, talking about it, taking photos of it. I also like baking cake, even though most of my attempts have ended in some degree of failure. You might think that cupcakes are the easiest thing you can possibly bake, but you’d be wrong. Take a look at these fail-cakes I made recently, before I was told that I should be putting the liners into a cupcake pan.

I’ve decided that one of my next projects will be learning how to make a decent cupcake. Not just decent even, but awesome cupcakes. And not just awesome, but suitable for friends with various allergies and particular diets as well. And, of course, they have to be super duper pretty.

This led me to today’s attempt at baking egg-free strawberry shortcake inspired cupcakes, based on this recipe from Honest Fare and with some decorative inspiration from Spork or Foon. I’ve never made egg-free cake before, but more than one friends isn’t able to eat egg and I often find myself feeling like baking but lacking eggs, so it seemed like a good idea to give it a go.

My first batch was somewhat ill-measured (doing a quarter recipe is hard, okay?) and turned out dense, rather tasteless and too small – it seems recipe doesn’t rise as much as regular cupcakes, or I was doing something quite wrong. For the second batch I bumped up the amount of sugar and lemon juice as well as being a bit more careful with measurements, and though they still turned out a bit smaller than I was hoping and not as delicious as regular cupcakes, they didn’t turn out too bad.

For topping I made a basic vanilla buttercream icing and mixed in my attempt at strawberry jam as I didn’t have any handy (chopped strawberries, sugar and a little water simmered down in a saucepan and cooled – worked pretty nice actually). Piped the mixture on somewhat unevenly and added in some little pieces of chopped strawberry, cut into triangles to sort of imitate the shape of full slices of strawberries. In the end they look sort of pretty, if inconsistent in terms of the piping, but the taste isn’t quite there. More work and experimenting needed!