New Books and a New Recipe!

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Gluten Free Maple Bacon Cupcake Recipe!

So my cookbooks are gone. I sent them by boat when I moved from Japan to the US and...  the package is MIA. grr...  I will have to start over with my cookbook collection, but thank goodness for the internet. 

To start off my new collection I bought a couple brand new books.

I'm a fan of the Bake at 350 blog. Her stuff is just so cute! She posted on her blog that amazon was suddenly selling her book for some ridiculously low price ($5, I think), so of course I snatched that right up. The first thing I tried out of her book was making royal icing transfers. I had never done this before, but it looked simple enough. 

I first printed out the message that I wanted to put on a cookie. This time it was baby cookies for a friend who is expecting. I taped wax paper over the printout and traced over the printout with royal icing. I let the royal icing dry overnight and the next day I lined and flooded cookies. After I flooded about a dozen cookies (about 15min.) I took the dried royal icing letters and stuck them on the (still wet) iced cookie. It was pretty much impossible getting the letters on there without getting a bit of wet icing on my fingers, but I think it was better to use fingers rather than tweezers because the tweezers may have broken the royal icing (it was a bit fragile). I did 2 types of these transfers:

to get the lifted bubbles I waited about an hour after flooding and then just put colored dots all over with my flooding icing. If you want the icing colors to blend then you need to put the color in right after flooding (while the icing is still wet). Details and cookie/royal icing recipes can all be found on the Bake at 350 blog. 

The next book I bought because I am interested in baking healthier for myself, since I have a sensitivity to refined sugars and possibly gluten. I'm still not sure exactly what, but healthy is always better anyway. I have tried gluten free baking in the past, but everything tasted...  not so great. Even the few items I made that were edible had this funky texture (almost gritty). I would gladly take a regular cupcake over that weird gritty stuff. But gluten free bakers are showing up on cupcake wars, so it seems there is a a hope for gluten free, healthy sweets. When the decorating cookies book went on sale, I went ahead and bought this book that I had been on the fence about for a while:

I put off making any of these cupcakes because they require such a variety of specialty flours and products. It was really intimidating and just looking at the long list of ingredients would put me off. However an opportunity arose where I needed to make a special cake. My cousin has several food allergies, 2 of which include dairy and wheat. So I pulled out this never before used book and gave the Vanilla Gluten Freedom Cupcakes a shot, but decided to add some maple and bacon, since those are one of the few things he CAN eat and I was assuming the gluten free cupcakes weren't going to taste too great to begin with. I was wrong though. These cakes were awesome. So awesome that I'm sure they would be just as awesome without the maple and bacon.

oh yes.

super moist cupcake, but still fluffy and light. and no strange gritty texture!

Recipe for Not-So-Vegan Maple Bacon Gluten Free Cupcakes (adapted from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World). Makes 9 cupcakes.

Ingredients:

3-4 strips of bacon, baked or fried crisp. Reserve drippings.

3/4 cup soy milk

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup pure maple syrup

2tsp. vanilla extract

1/4cup tapioca flour

2Tb. ground flax seed

1/3 cup  almond flour (or corn flour)

1/2 cup white rice flour (or brown rice flour)

1/2 cup quinoa flour

1tsp. baking powder

1/2tsp. baking soda

1/4tsp. salt

1. Preheat oven to 350℉ and prepare cupcake pans. Bake or fry bacon and reserve the grease. Let cool until it is cool enough to touch (about 10min.)

2. While the bacon grease is cooling, whisk together the almond flour, white rice flour, quinoa flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

3. Once cooled, put bacon grease, soy milk, maple syrup, sugar and vanilla extract in a large bowl and mix slightly, until everything is blended. Add tapioca flour and flax seed and blend on medium for about 1 minute, or until all the tapioca has evenly dissolved.

4. Add to the wet mixture the remaining dry ingredients and mix on medium-high for 2 minutes or more, to be sure all ingredients are thoroughly blended.

5. Fill cupcake cups at least 3/4 full, or about 1cm (.5") below the top of the liner, as the cupcakes will not rise much. Bake for 20-23min.

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Following the non-vegan theme of this cupcake, I made a regular American buttercream (however, you can probably just substitute the butter with margarine to make it vegan).

1/2 cup high ratio shortening (Sweetex if you have it, otherwise Crisco will do)

1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

3 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1/4 cup cornstarch

1 tsp pure maple syrup

2-3Tb salt water (just add salt until it tastes salty, about 1-2tsp. per 1/2 cup)

1. Blend the butter and shortening until thoroughly creamed.

2. Add powdered sugar and cornstarch and slowly blend with butter mixture.

3. Add salt water small bits at a time until the frosting comes together (you may not need all the water) and then blend on medium-high for about 3-5min.

4. Spread onto cooled cupcakes and top with crisp bacon.

**EDIT: I realized that I originally forgot to write sugar into the recipe (I have since amended the recipe). The original recipe calls for 3/4 cup, but I reduced it to 1/2 cup, since I used maple syrup.