Mojito Cupcakes

When I saw fresh mint at the farmer's market this past weekend, I knew it was time to make some mojito cupcakes. I got the recipe a few years ago from Vegan YumYum, (who in turn modified the vanilla cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World), although I make the frosting with a lot of extra rum. These are the best. Here's how it goes.

First you infuse some fresh spearmint in soy milk:


Then you add lime juice and rum to curdle it, and cream with sugar:


The lime zest goes in with the dry ingredients:

As usual it all gets mixed together and baked, then topped with frosting once cool. Here's how I do the frosting:

1/3 cup nonhydrogenated margarine (I use Earth Balance)

1/3 cup nonhydrogenated shortening (I use Whole Foods brand)

3.5 cups confectioner’s sugar (you may need more)

3 Tbsp dark rum (I use Barbancourt 5 star)

1 Tbsp lime juice

Beat the shortening and margarine together until well combined and fluffy.  Add the sugar and beat well until thoroughly combined (if too dry, start adding the rum and lime juice, but don’t add liquid all at once or it will splash).  Add the rum and lime juice and beat a few more minutes.  If too runny, add more powdered sugar.  Add to the cooled cupcakes and garnish with a fresh mint leaf (add the mint leaves right before serving so they don’t wilt). I like to drip a little bit of extra rum into the icing right before serving so you get that volatile rum aroma when it comes up to your nose. The result:

Jon Vs. Cupcakes

I was pretty shocked that in searching for studies of competitive eating, I was only able to find a single one. Naturally, as a scientist, I am intrigued by the concept. Nonetheless, I decided that it would be better to volunteer all day at the DC Veg Fest than to enter a vegan cupcake eating contest and likely end up feeling sorry for myself all day. As it turned out, I did both. A last minute no-show for the cupcake contest left an empty chair, so I decided to fill it. My stomach was already in knots from a very busy morning of volunteering, and I'd just had too much, but hey: there's always room for five cupcakes.

The basic premise was simple: whoever could eat 5 cupcakes the fastest (with no hands and no water) would be the victor. This was harder than I thought it would be. I basically bit the first two cupcakes in half and swallowed them without chewing, thinking this would both be faster and avoid wasting valuable saliva. Sadly, it turns out that swallowing things whole makes me want to puke really bad, so after that I had to slow down and chew lots and focus on pretending all was well with my stomach.

Shortly after this picture was taken (while I was eating the third cupcake), Doron Petersan (owner of Sticky Fingers bakery) grabbed my shoulders, started shaking the hell out of me, and telling me to chew faster. This required heavy concentration to prevent urgent vomiting:

Once she let go of me and I could calm things down a bit, I was able to take stock of my competition. I was hoping someone else would be winning so I could slow down more, but no luck. I was clearly still in the running. I decided to step up my game.

Meanwhile, the other competitors were doing the same.

You can see a wide shot of the end of the contest here (note my very clean plate and not very clean face:

Being an honest lad, I wanted to follow the rules which meant a totally clean plate, and a totally empty mouth before I could declare victory. But in the end, even though I still had a bit of chewing to do, I was declared the Regretful Cupcake King. My face pretty much says it all:

My prize? A mug and three more cupcakes, including this lovely gold-dust one:



Afterwards I still had anther 3-4 hours of volunteering to go, so it made for a rough afternoon, but perhaps it was worth it for the glory and the learning experience.

Spumoni Cupcakes

When I recently saw some Neopolitan vegan ice cream in the freezer, it made me realize how much I used to love spumoni ice cream. Then it hit me: we had pistachio butter we’d bought in Portland, and I could make spumoni cupcakes instead.

The basic concept was to make three kinds of cupcake batter (a 1/3 recipe of each) then layer them into the cupcake pan (note that the original colors were actually green and red as they should be, despite what they turned into after baking):

The recipes we used were the basic chocolate cupcake from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (unmodified), a modified version of Peanut Butter Cupcakes from the same book (but we substituted the pistachio butter for the peanut butter, and agave for molasses), and a modified version of Strawberry Cupcakes form the Joy of Vegan Baking (but instead of strawberries, we took about 2/3 cup of frozen cherries, thawed and pureed).

Since in the end the chocolate was the strongest flavor, we decided to make pistachio and cherry buttercream. I thought they were pretty good, but not worth the effort (and the cherry flavor was never really strong enough). Sarah thought they were just mediocre. It was fun to change it up though!