Wait... No butter?

The NB has moved into the co-op, which is a large orgy full of hippies and pot and some cats under one roof. They do cute community-type things like have a roster for who cooks dinner for everyone one each night. There are 16 of them, so this is no small task. And, three (or more?) of them are vegan, so all the dinz have to be vegan. You know, like even more than just vegetarian, like zero animal products? No eggs (bye quiche), no milk or cheese (bye lasagna, grilled cheese, everything good in this life) and no butter (um... goodbye Paula Deen's entire stock of recipes.) So it pretty much goes without saying that there's no bacon.

No bacon???

Anyway, because I love to win the hearts of new people with baked goods, and because I wanted to play with the KitchenAid, I ventured to make vegan chocolate cupcakes.

Love of my life...

Here's the recipe. If anyone is ever feeling vegany.

Vinegar in a cupcake?? Let curdle?? BLEARGH!

Here they are before being iced. I didn't take a picture of the after-icing, because first I delivered most of them to the very greatful hippies who happened to be inflicted with the munchies when we arrived, and the few that I left behind were attacked by ants before I could take a picture.

Speaking of icing, I don't think her recipe is quite right. Hers makes 12, so I doubled everything, but the buttercream was WAY to thick. It wouldn't go through my piping tips ( :( no trial run there...) even after I had soy-milked it down, resulting in me spreading the icing rather than piping. Then I checked the KitchenAid cookbook which gave a similar recipe only it was 4 cups of icing sugar (instead of 5) and zero cocoa (which one might need to make it chocolate...) so that kind of explains why it was so thick. So yea, if you do make these, take that into consideration.

Melissa came down halfway through the baking and said that it smelt like bacon, which is ironic, n'est pas? But other than that, both Dad and NB said that they were delish. The hippies also, but they were high so I don't imagine that they were very picky at that point.