Vegan Cupcakes Take Over My Life

I've been working my way through Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World for the past couple of weeks now, and I am having a blast. Okay, I haven't gotten past the second recipe, but it's a fun cookbook--it would just be more fun if I lived closer to a healthier grocery store. Not having easy access to non-hydrogenated margarines and shortenings, agave nectar, or even plain vanilla soy yogurt (the local supermarket does have fruit-flavored soy yogurts) has made it difficult to move on to cupcake number three or to frost the ones I have made--luckily I'm not the only one I know who actually prefers cake without frosting. I'm just taking my sweet time working through the variations on the basic vanilla and chocolate cupcakes until I can make it out to the co-op or the big chain natural foods store.

The first Golden Vanillas I made were minis, and they were lovely little pillows of tasty goodness. The Basic Chocolates I made full-size, and they were indubitably the best chocolate cupcakes ever made (I am totally tooting the recipe's horn and not my own here).

It was on the night I decided to enhance the color of the cupcakes by adding in some turmeric that a rogue cousin showed up on my doorstep ready to whisk me away to an aunt's house that I found out just what happens when you don't pop those babies into the oven right away. I knew it wasn't a good idea, but I just couldn't face throwing the cupcakes-to-be into the trash. Since there was no time to wait for them to bake, we jumped into the car with cupcake batter already in the paper-lined muffin pan in tow. They probably ended up waiting fifteen or twenty minutes with the commute and preheating time, and by the time they went in the oven it was starting to look like the oil was separating from the rest of the batter. They were, at least, edible, if more than a little crumbly and mostly sticking to their papers (that one could be blamed on the lack of patience necessary to wait for a cool cupcake). They were too crunchy (crunchy at all is too crunchy for a cupcake), but my aunt apparently likes her cupcakes a little crunchy around the edges, completely flat, and a little more tan than golden. Next time, cupcake waits for no man!