Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes

This was kind of an accident. Not the vegan part though – that was quite intentional. I was trying to bake a birthday treat for a vegan friend and I set out to make chocolate cookies. In fact, I set out to make Vegan Salted Date Caramel Chocolate Cookies from Jar of Lemons.

A series of mistakes led to quite a different result. However it seems they were still enjoyed, therefore they were deemed bloggable.

So this is based on what I did:

• I put 3 apples in a blender because that’s my idea of apple sauce.
• Mixed the apple (paste) with 3 tbs coconut oil, 4 tbs honey and 2 caps vanilla.
• Now these really did not turn out very sweet so if I did this again I think I’d put sugar instead of honey…your call. Or also…maybe more apples/dates.
• Mix 1 ½ cups flour with ½ cup cocoa and 2 tsp baking soda. Argh I’m so silly. Another problem I had with this was the texture, it was weirdly doughy. I just realised the only flour I had (that was not oat flour) was bread flour so I used that instead. To be honest I never thought of it as that different to normal flour but now it all makes sense…Ok so yes, more advice would be to use normal flour
• I soaked 8 dates and put them in the grinder with the water I used to soak them, plus 1 vanilla cap. I tried to follow the instructions for caramel sauce and I got date-vanilla water instead, so I just mixed the whole thing in with the dry and wet ingredients. Well done me.
• What I ended up with was not cookie dough. So I put them in a cupcake tray.
• They baked for about 15 mins at, you guessed it, 180°C

I was very very sad when they were finished because they were not sweet enough to be cupcakes. Fortunately, the vegan life isn’t as tough as I thought. I found a vegan icing recipe on Group Recipes – it’s basically chocolate sauce.

It also wasn’t very sweet but lovely and chocolatey.

I halved the recipe:

• Mix ½ cup sugar with 3 tbs cornstarch, 2 tbs cocoa powder and ¼ tsp salt.
• Whisk in ½ cup of water and let thicken over medium heat.
• Keep whisking it so the sides don’t solidify.
• Once it’s thick enough, mix in 1 tbs coconut oil and ¼ cap vanilla.

And you can put this on anything, or just eat it. Chocolate is good for the soul.