Another Gluten Free Cupcake

Recipe for Vegan, Gluten Free Chai Tea Latte Cupcakes

With the success of my Maple Bacon Gluten Free Cupcakes, I thought I would try and see if the recipe would translate to another non-Gluten Free recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The recipe I tried was Chai Tea Latte Cupcakes and I used the Gluten Free flour mixture from the Gluten Freedom Cupcakes in place of AP flour.

Hm, well they didn't turn out as nice as I had hoped. I thought the batter was looking a little watery and was worried the cakes wouldn't hold their structure. But they turned out ok. In fact, the crumb ended up being extremely moist and a bit dense. Not quite as fluffy as the Gluten Freedom Cupcakes. 

borderline "too moist" crumb

The flavor was unfortunately not so great either, which was probably mostly my fault. I was shocked to discover that I hadn't brought back one of the several bottles of ground cardamom I had in Japan. So in place of the cardamom I threw in a bit of Chinese Five Spice. Ha. Well, anise is similar to cardamom, right? ......   I also thought this cake had way too much cinnamon. In fact, that was all I could taste. But I thought there was potential in this cake, so I tried again. 

I went out and bought some $15 cardamom (!). I thought of replacing the soy yogurt with applesauce, but I wanted to get rid of some of that extra moisture, so instead I opted to omit the yogurt. I also put the loose leaf tea right into the cupcakes, rather than steep tea bags, since I really wanted the tea flavor to come out. As I was mixing, the smell of cardamom filled the kitchen and I was sure this was it. It smelled so good and nothing was even baking yet.

I have to say, the crumb looked so much better. They almost looked like they could be a little dry.

But after cutting it open I saw that it was still pretty moist. Still not quite as fluffy as I had hoped, but much better than the previous attempt. The flavor was, well, strongly of cardamom. *sigh*. BUT other than the fact that there was just way too strong a cardamom taste, I thought the cake overall was pretty good. It tasted much closer to a chai latte and the texture was much closer to a cupcake. My next thought is that perhaps I didn't mix everything long enough. Maybe my mixing even longer I can really develop the structure of the cake (and soak up the flax seeds better so you don't notice those little gritty bits when you chew). I'm also toying with the idea of scrapping the vegan part of it and using regular milk instead of soy. Not sure if that will change anything, since I haven't played around much with gluten free yet. 

So this is still a work in progress, but I am MUCH closer than before.

So here is my *untested* recipe for Gluten Free Chai Latte Cupcakes, adapted from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.

Ingredients:

1 cup soy milk

1/4 canola oil

3/4 sugar

1tsp. vanilla extract

1/4 cup tapioca flour

2Tb. ground flax seeds

1/3 cup almond flour

1/2 cup white rice flour

1/2 cup quinoa flour

1tsp. baking powder

1/2tsp. baking soda

1/4tsp. salt

1tsp. ground cinnamon

1/2tsp. ground cardamom

1/4tsp. ground ginger

1/4tsp. cloves

pinch of white pepper (I used cayenne, but white pepper is probably better)

1. Preheat oven to 350℉ and prepare cupcake pans.

2. Heat soy milk in a small saucepan on medium heat until almost boiling (should at least be steaming). Remove from heat, add the tea, and let steep/cool for at least 10min.

3. Whisk together in a medium bowl the flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices.

4. When the soy milk has cooled a bit, pour back into measuring cup and add any extra soy milk to make sure it is 1 cup. 

5. Lightly whisk together the soy (tea) milk, sugar, oil and vanilla until blended. Add tapioca flour and flax seeds and beat on medium speed for about 1 minute, or until the tapioca has completely dissolved. You may want to beat a little bit longer to really make sure the flax seed are incorporated into the batter. 

6. Add remaining dry ingredients, mix at low speed. Once the ingredients are incorporated, switch to medium-high speed and beat for 2 minutes or more. 

7. Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full (the cupcakes will rise, but deflate a bit when they are ready to be taken out of the oven) and bake 20-22 minutes. 

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Frosting Ingredients (American Buttercream):

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

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. You can decorate them with large cinnamon sugar crystals.

New Books and a New Recipe!

レシピはこちら
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.