Monday, October 14, 2013

Fall food is the best food: pumpkin cupcakes and maple coconut whipped cream


I must admit that I'm pretty lazy with my cupcake making. I found two brands that make vegan/gluten free/nut free cake mixes, and they're so amazing that I'm afraid to bake from scratch. However, in preparation for Thanksgiving dinner at my parents' house, I wanted to go a little bit out of my baking comfort zone and combine pumpkin puree with chocolate cake mix. I googled "how to add pumpkin puree to cake mix" and I got a lot of results for substituting the eggs/butter/oil/milk for pumpkin puree, but that doesn't help for a "just add water" cake mix. So, I decided to wing it, and the result was super delicious so I want to share my "recipe."


The cake mixes I use are Wholesome Chow (they also make really good icing mix, which is what I used this time) and Kokimo Kitchen (I've also tried their awesome "just add water" pancake mix).

The Kokimo Kitchen chocolate cake mix calls for 2 cups of water, so first I tried 1 cup of water and 1 cup of pumpkin puree, but that was a bit too dry so I added another half cup of each, which was perfect. I also added 1 tsp of maple syrup, 1 tbsp of light agave nectar, and some cinnamon. I cooked the cupcakes at 375 degrees for 25 minutes (doing the fork check multiple times, which is why one cupcake in the picture has a large hole in it). The cupcakes turned out kind of brownie-like, so I think the next time I make this I'll just make brownies instead.

For the icing, I mixed 1 cup of pumpkin puree, 1/2 a cup of vegan margarine, 2 tsps of vanilla soy milk, 1/2 a tsp of maple syrop, 1/2 a tsp of vanilla extract, some cinnamon and the Wholesome Chow vanilla frosting mix.




I also found a recipe for vegan coconut whipped cream. You MUST click on that link and try the recipe, because it's incredibly easy and tasty. Maybe next year I'll figure out how to make vegan pumpkin pie, because this stuff would taste incredible on pie!

(This picture is deceiving because I took it just after the shaking part of the recipe, and the whipped cream is so thick that it coated the inside of the jar. I actually made about 1 cup.)


Happy Thanksgiving!