Cupcakes!

Yesterday was Adrianna's second birthday -- TWO YEARS ago she was born in a March snowstorm in Brooklyn. I'm not sure where those two years have gone, but she's really grown up the past few weeks. She's talking a lot more and jumping and skipping around.

We made cupcakes for Adrianna's birthday last night. I mostly used the vanilla cupcake recipe in The Joy of Vegan Baking, but made a few changes: I used organic canola oil instead of the melted vegan margarine. I added 1 T of beet powder to make the cupcakes a deep pink. (We made these cupcakes for Jacqui's birthday in January and only used 1 tsp of beet powder. The batter was pink, but the baked cupcakes were just plain vanilla.) I used vanilla hemp milk for a little extra vanilla and lots of omega 3s and 6s. Yum.

The recipe always makes more than 12 cupcakes for me. This time, we had 18 lovely pink cupcakes.

The girls sprinkled organic powdered sugar to top the cupcakes before we stuck a number two candle into Adrianna's, sang happy birthday, and ate our cupcakes!

Jacqui's Birthday!!

For Jacqui's birthday last week, I made vanilla cupcakes in pink and red silicone heart molds and topped them with chocolate peanut butter frosting. Both recipes came from The Joy of Vegan Baking, an excellent cookbook that I regularly read, if not use. The cake was soft and springy, and not too sweet. The frosting was a little decadent, and a little like Reese's pieces in spreadable, vegan form.

Surprisingly, the recipes turned out well (other than my overfilled and overflowing cupcake molds) considering my lack of measuring spoons and cups. The recipe, which claimed to make 10-12 cupcakes, made 16 (and could have made more if I hadn't overfilled those 16).

Jacqui and Fiona decorated the cupcakes with vegan sprinkles that I bought some time ago from veganessentials.com. I wish I had gotten some photos of them decorating, but I was busy frosting to keep up with their sprinkling, and didn't get any action shots.