From the Voluptuous Vegan cookbook.

In short, because I’m feeling lazy, it didn’t look that great so I didn’t take a picture of it. It didn’t taste that great, either. Maybe it just wasn’t to my tastes. Not a great first recipe from the cookbook, but it wasn’t awful either.

These were made for yet another co-worker’s birthday, and yet again I spent all night baking because I was too lazy to start when I got home from work yesterday. Procrastination FTW!

Agave Vanilla:

I had planned on making the Carrot Cake cuppers, but I realized that we have a newly diagnosed diabetic in the department, so I decided to make the Agave cupcakes with the Super Natural Agave Icing. The cupcake batter was a little thin, but the cupcakes puffed up really nicely in the oven – in fact, the doming that you see on these isn’t the icing, it’s the cupcake beneath. The icing was interesting to put together because it contains no powdered sugar – it’s sweetened with agave nectar and uses arrowroot and soymilk powder to “solidify” it. My funny story about making the icing was when it came time to add the soymilk powder. As usual, I didn’t completely read the recipe before I started making it, and this step calls for an electric hand mixer, which I do not own. I almost always make my buttercream with my stand up Kitchen Aid mixer, and finished the Lime Buttercream before making this – since this recipe didn’t use powdered sugar, I figured that I wouldn’t need the mixer, so I had put the Kitchen Aid bowl with the buttercream in the fridge. Now I need a mixer. Whoops. So, what did I do? I held the bowl up to the spinning mixer by hand. It was much more high-larious than it reads, I promise, and everything turned out okay. Everything was made last night and were frosted this morning, so the consistency of the icing coming out of the freezer was almost fudge like, and it scared me. For the first time ever, I thought that one of Isa’s recipes was going to fail me. However, I popped the lot of it into the microwave for 30 seconds, just long enough to soften it up nicely. It’s definitely an icing that you pat on, rather than try to smear too much. If it tastes anything like it smells, it’s going to be awesome.

Coconut Lime:

The lime buttercream on these little monsters a) tastes amazing and b) wanted to melt 5 minutes after I frosted them. I don’t know if I got them in the fridge fast enough, but this picture was taken before I noticed any falling apart. The cupcakes are full of coconut goodness – coconut oil, coconut milk, shredded coconut; and that’s just on the inside. Lots of lime zest inside and out and all of the fresh squeezed lime juice in the buttercream is making me drool in my cubicle here at work. I can’t wait to get into these bitches. I’m getting a lot better with working with frosting, I frosted these into lovely snowball mounds with relatively little effort with an offset frosting spatula. Ah, my little Christmas Miracles.