Welcome to the very first installment of “Vegan Treats,” in which I completely avoid explaining why I chose to be vegan and how it’s the biggest environmental issue of our time, and instead give you a couple movie recommendations* so that I can focus on QUEER PRIDE WOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOO
Before SCOTUS had made their ruling, I had already made up my mind to bake a little treat celebrating Pride month and the Pride festivities this weekend in San Francisco (I live there). It needed to be vegan, and it needed to be hella rainbow.
I was all geared up to concoct my own Frankenrecipe, but I found a pre-existing recipe for Pride Cupcakes! Many thanks to The Chubby Vegan for this recipe, it was totally simple and the cupcakes turned out so well. And the fun part was he released this recipe just before DOMA was overturned two years ago during Pride, without even know it would happen, and the same happened when I revived the recipe! (All of my coworkers were like, did you wake up early to bake these, how could you have known?!?!?!)
Here’s the recipe, adapted/annotated for those of you who don’t know things about baking but still want to give these a try.
The first thing to note is that this recipe does not include frosting. There is all kinds of vegan frosting out there, choose whatever you can find! I ate these without frosting tbh and they were delicious.
Makes 12 cupcakes! A homo’s dozen.
You will need:
1 TB apple cider vinegar
1 ½ scant cups plain soymilk (Whole Foods sells single servings of soy milk if you won’t use the rest)
2 1/8 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. kosher salt (I used sea salt)
1 1/8 cups sugar
½ cup canola oil
1 ½ tsp. vanilla extract
Food coloring for Red, Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue, Purple (I bought Red, Yellow, Green, & Blue from Target and mixed. FYI, food coloring lives in the baking aisle)
White cupcake liners if you want to see the layers through them/ bring them to other people neatly
Here’s how to do it:
Preheat the oven to 350º. Spray muffin cups with nonstick spray or line with paper cupcake liners. Set aside.
Mix the apple cider vinegar with soymilk to equal 1 ½ cups. Stir well and set aside (the mixture will curdle).
In a large mixing bowl, stir together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In another mixing bowl whisk together the soymilk mixture, canola oil, and vanilla. Add the wet to the dry ingredients and beat until smooth using a hand-held mixer, stopping once to scrape down the sides of the bowl. I just did all of this with a fork and elbow grease, I don’t have fancy things like whisks or hand-mixers
Here is the annoying part… It’s not that bad! Put on some music or TV or something. Take all of the batter and divide it evenly into six separate bowls. Add food color to each of your bowls, starting with purple, and mix until you achieve the appropriate color. Once you have all of your batters appropriately colored, start by evenly distributing the batter into each of the muffin cups in your pan. This is not an exact science, but do your best to layer the colors. The order from the bottom should be: purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. Do not stress about this. I messed up the “divide equally” and the “evenly distributing” parts about as much as I could have and they still turned out very pretty and nicely layered!
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until a cake tester (i.e. fork) inserted in the middle of a cupcake comes out clean.
Let cool in the pans for at least 5 minutes, then remove cupcakes from the pan and place on a wire rack. Let the cupcakes cool completely before frosting. Again, I don’t have a fancy wire rack so I just put mine on a plate
See? Not so bad. Added fun if you don’t have 6 bowls that are the same size.
This has been a big week for me: I shaved half of my head, I am now legally able to marry whoever I want wherever I want in my country, and I am an aunt!
What better way to celebrate than REFINED SWEETS. Food coloring and bleached sugar aren’t /the/ most environmentally friendly things, but at least there was no factory farming involved.
*Forks Over Knives, Food INC, Cowspiracy, ETC ETC ETC
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