vegansaurus!

All-vegan Cupcake Wars episode this Sunday!  »

This Sunday, March 4, there’s an ALL VEGAN episode of Cupcake Wars!

They say, “In the first ever Cupcake Wars all-vegan showdown, four vegan bakers fight to have their cupcakes at the opening day celebration for the inaugural Los Angeles Green Festival.” 

Woo! So exciting! Now give vegans a regular cooking show! Preferably starring Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Chloe Coscarelli living in a tree house together with a bear and a squirrel. Also, they’re always having a tea party and I’m in the background eating all the food and waving at my mom. PLENTY MORE IDEAS WHERE THAT CAME FROM. Call me!

[Perhaps someone will make Sarah’s Chocolate Raspberry Cupcakes and take home the gold? People with cable will find out this Sunday!]

Veganville baked goods on the cheap for Vegansaurus readers! Whoopie pies shipped to your face!  »

So, what’s the deal with Black Friday? Do we still boycott buying things? Or do we only boycott buying from big business? I’m so out of the loop! I do know I’ll be buying a Caltrain ticket back to to the city so I can work Friday morning (lucky me!) and then a $2 bottle of wine from Whole Foods to drown my sorrows because I’m broke, single and no one loves me. Just kidding! My cat will be so stoked to see me home after a night spent at Grandma’s house!

If you aren’t broke as a motherfucking joke and can buy many glorious items for sale today, please—let me lead the way.

Gigi is a vegan baker, located in the East Bay, who’s items you can find pretty much everywhere, including:

Philz Coffee in Berkeley
Tay Tah Cafe Albany
Catahoula Cafe Richmond
Thornhill Coffee House in Montclair
Detour Cafe in Berkeley
And soon, Never Felt Better in Sacramento!

Her products sell under the name Veganville and are also available on Etsy! She is offering a 35 percent discount on everything in her etsy store, starting Thanksgiving midnight through Cyber Monday at midnight. Type in the code BigV35. Anything at her store (except for gift certificates, but let’s be serious here)! We are going in for the cupcakes (or whoopie pies! Or brownies! Whatever you fancy, there is so much to choose from!)

[Vegan HoHo cupcakes. Yes please and thank you.]

Denver Avocado Takedown report: Vegans rule!  »

A month ago, I asked you to help me win the Denver Avocado Takedown for the vegans. The bad news: I didn’t win. The better news: Vegans totally took over. And vegans totally won!!

I’ll tell this story mainly in photos.

I spent the whole weekend cooking. 250 cupcakes. Notice the *free* case of Avocados from Mexico (TM) in the background. This is the pile I started with.

Thanks, Kitchen Robot, for pureeing the green stuff so well!

Oh hell yeah. Mini avocado-lime cupcakes, based on a recipe from Big Vegan (review here), and decorated to adorable perfection (thanks YouTube!). I made my own colored sugar. It’s dead easy: Mix sugar with food coloring in a bowl; use a spoon. DONE!

If there was a prize for presentation, we woulda won. That’s my husband Danny in his new Vegansaurus shirt. Note the awesome sign he colored for us. Note the lights and cupcake tree. Yup. Also note that the Vegan Van was next to me. Love it! There was a vegan to my left as well! And so many more! Somehow we took over!

This is a plate of only the vegan food on hand. Out of 23 entries, 13 had vegan options. HOLY SHIT WE OUTNUMBERED THEM! One chick with non-vegan cupcakes was totally apologizing to me.

That’s me near the center with the Vegansaurus shirt peeking from my apron, waiting to hear about first place. Eek!

In the end, the judges gave third place to a vegan dish, and the people gave vegans both first and third places. WE WIN!

I got to go home with a zillion leftover cupcakes, an avocado apron, totebag, and peeler, and an awesome good time. Dudes, it was a glimpse of the future: WE OUTNUMBERED THEM! VEGAN WAS NORMAL!

Some recipes will be online soon; I’ll update with a link.

There’s going to be a vegan cupcake and cupcake-themed art party in LA!  »

Cupcakes and art happen to be two of my favorite things (along with elephants, Netflix, and Fla-vor-ice) so I’m so jealous of you L.A. folks! Urban Food Crawl, a vegan food tour company, is hosting Cupcakes + Art: a vegan cupcake competition and cupcake-themed art show! Deets from Urban Food Crawl:

Cupcakes & Art
Sunday, Nov. 6, 3 p.m. at Hold Up Art, 358 E. 2nd St. Los Angeles

The $35 ticket includes entrance to the event, where you’ll be tasting and judging cupcakes from 10 local bakers. Proceeds from the art sales will go to the winning baker’s charity of choice! Stay tuned to our blog for more info on the participating bakers. There are a limited number of tickets available!

Oy, I’m so jealous! You can see the list of bakers and artists on their event page—it includes BabyCakes LA! So. Jealous. Is anyone going? I want a full report! Also, we are sending someone so you’ll get a full report, too. We can give full reports to each other. Good times! Also, they’ll be lots more Urban Food Crawls, so stay tuned to their site to eat so much more. Yay LA!

Product Review: Galaxy Nutritional Foods’ new vegan cream cheese!   »

[Totes awesome Instagram pic of the whole operation]

I got a chance to sample Galaxy Nutritional Foods new vegan cream cheese and I give it all my thumbs up! It’s yummy! First I made a bagel with the chive and garlic flavor, complete with tomatoes from my parents’ community garden plot, and it was tasty. I will say that it wasn’t garlicky enough for me—if you tell me it has garlic, it has to be garlicky with a capital HOLY MOLY. But it was good and didn’t have that kind of weird aftertaste some vegan cream cheeses have, you know?

BUT THEN! I decided to take the plain cream cheese they sent me and make vegan red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting! MINI red velvet cupcakes! I made mini bundt cakes too but I can’t figure out how to make them look nice with frosting; they are more glaze-friendly. Now, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s red velvet cupcakes with VANILLA frosting. BLEH! It’s GOT to be cream cheese. I used this recipe and it was good for the cake but I don’t recommend the cream cheese frosting recipe that goes along with it. The frosting recipe doesn’t have any sugar in it and kind of tasted crazy. I looked at every other cream cheese frosting recipe on the internet and they all had two to eight (eight!) cups of confectioners sugar in them, so I added about a cup to my butter-and-cream-cheese mixture. MUCH IMPROVED! My final decision: YUM! Excellent cream cheese frosting! My omni sister loved it too, and my mom said it was delicious and it’s the only red velvet cake she’s ever liked! High praise.

[The only mini cupcake papers we could find in our house were Halloween-themed! SPOOKY!]

The thing I like about this vegan cream cheese is that it’s like kind of tangy—you know how real cream cheese is a bit tangy? Like plain-yogurt-tangy? Yeah, it’s like that. Tofutti and those others totally lack that. Maybe it’s because this is the first vegan cream cheese that’s cultured? Could be! You know how science is! I think this cream cheese would be really good for making those simple cream cheese-based cheese cakes; those should be a bit tangy.

My sister said you can’t tell how small and adorbs the cupcakes are so we took a pic with Mitsy to show scale:

Oh, Mits. 

Vegan MoFo: cupcakes for breakfast!  »

So yeah, I eat cupcakes for breakfast like it ain’t no thing.
This is the Caramel Apple Spice Cupcake from my much-loved copy of Veganomicon. I made a few minor tweaks to the recipe.

For the cupcakes!
Ingredients
2 tart, firm apples (I used Gala)
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
1 Tbsp. vegan margarine (I used Earth Balance)
1 cup “milk”
1 Tbsp. lemon juice (bottle FTW!)
1/3 cup canola oil
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. lemon extract (because it’s easier to keep around than lemon zest)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg

Instructions
Preheat your oven to 350°F, and line your muffin tin with liners. Dice the apples into little pieces (next time I would use a food processor to get them reeeeeeaalllllly little).

Heat a skillet over medium heat, and stir in brown sugar and margarine until it starts bubbling, when you’ll add those apples. Cook and stir every so often until the water has mostly evaporated and the apples are kinda brown. This might take 15 minutes, so be patient. Then cool for a bit while you perform the next steps.

Whisk your “milk” and lemon juice in a big bowl, and let it sit for a few minutes to witness the miracle known as “curdling.”

Beat in oil, sugar, and extracts. Dump in the dry ingredients and stir only until moistened. Fold in the apples and whatever mystery liquids remain in your skillet (you thought I forgot about them, didn’t you?). Pour batter into your cupcake liners, and bake for 20-22 minutes until they pass the toothpick test. While they cool, make your frosting.

For the caramel-penuche frosting!
Ingredients
1/2 cup sugar
3 Tbsp. vegan margarine
1 Tbsp. molasses (god, I love when I get to use molasses, don’t you?)
1/2 cup “milk”
pinch of salt
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Instructions
Put everything except the powdered sugar and vanilla into a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally.

Keep stirring once in a while until it’s been boiling and foaming (much like rabies!) for eight minutes or so. Remove from heat, but don’t let it cool too long because this frosting is more of a bitch to work with the cooler it gets.

Beat the mixture with the vanilla and half the powdered sugar for a few minutes. Then add the rest of it. Electric beaters produce best results for me, but go for it by hand if you have guns of steel. Spread it onto your cupcakes stat. Eat for any and every meal of the day, upside-down with a spoon; you’ll see why.