On Veganism and Cupcakes

Vegan baking happens at our place. It happens a lot. I’m admittedly the one token vegan, but in our fridge you’re generally more likely to find rice milk than cow’s milk, Earth Balance than butter, and you’ll come across tofu more often than beef. My stack of cookbooks by Isa Chandra Moskovitz are collectively enjoyed, sometimes worshipped, and are the first place any of us will turn when baked goods are needed.

There’s always that initial reaction of people who haven’t sunken their teeth into so much as one vegan cookie before, and who are pretty sure they’ve never eaten anything vegan before in their life, to the words ‘vegan cupcakes’. I’ve heard, “Aren’t those really bad?”, “How can you make cake without eggs?”, and, “I’m sorry, I just can’t see it being the same.”

One of my personal convictions about veganism is that it’s a personal choice, and we all have the right to that; you won’t catch me waving PETA literature and trying to convert people. Where I do try to change their minds, though, is when it comes to this prevailing view that food without animal products just can’t be as good, and that anyone who eats this way is seriously deprived. I guess at some point I just got sick of the looks of pity I sometimes receive as people imagine me subsisting entirely on celery sticks and hummus. I’ve heard, “Wow, you must miss dessert,” and from my previous boss, “No wonder you’re so skinny; you must hardly eat anything.”

I love surprising these people; I love that all it takes is a cupcake for them to change their minds. I’ve been told in the case of cupcakes, cookies, and most triumphantly, cheesecake, that the vegan recipes I’ve found have actually tasted better than their egg- and dairy-laden counterparts. It’s in this spirit of changing people’s minds about what does and doesn’t need to be present for the enjoyment of food that I love to put effort into feeding people.

The two following batches of cupcakes were from a Vegan Feast Night that I hosted when I was staying with my family over Christmas. I won’t go into details about the rest of the dinner, as this is first and foremost a cupcake blog, but I will say that I spent two straight days cooking, and that the end result was an enormous smorgasbord of internationally inspired dishes; everybody left stuffed to the gills. The metaphorical icing on the metaphorical cupcake that was this dinner, though, were these non-metaphorical cupcakes: the first are Mexican hot chocolate cupcakes, and the second are tiramisu, both from ‘Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World’, the book that we will forever be writing the praises of because there are just too many good things to be said. The Mexican hot chocolate ones were lovely, baked with corn flour for a bit of a crunch, and a little cayenne pepper for just the slightest hint of spiciness. The tiramisu cupcakes were so good that I’m going to make a whole other post about the batch that I made last week; they are heaven in cupcake form.

Without further ado:









Love and kittens,

Sara