Good and Bad from Isa

I've been loving Vegan Brunch and think it one of Isa's best books along with my bible- vegan cupcakes take over the world.

I followed her simple but brilliant suggestion to add lemon pepper to my potatoes, I used chat potatoes because they are superior really. However, beware most of the lemon pepper options in the supermarket seem to have chicken in them, the salt free option doesn't though.

I have found mixed results with Veganomicon though, we loved the leek and bean cassoluet but had issues with the biscuits and had to throw them out.

We also made the seitan cutlets from,Veganomicon and they sucked, they were rubbery and even the taste was wrong it just tasted like gluten flour.

Baby cupcakes

Ok take two with carrot cake cupcakes. This time mini cupcakes for my colleagues baby shower. I have coloured the icing pink because she is having a girl using the beetroot trick. This time I experimented with adding half cup extra flour to the recipe and then adding 3/4 cup of flour and I couldn't tell the difference. I think adding a full extra cup extra would be too much. I then sprinkled cinnamon on top because the spices really didn't come through in mini size. I cooked them for about 13-15 minutes.



I then made mini lemon macadamia cupcakes cupcakes with white choc chips, also from VCTOTW. The white choc chips really blended well with the other two flavours, maybe too well in that the flavour didn't stand out enough for me.

Here they are, side by side. I put walnut pieces on the carrot cake ones and macadamia pieces on the lemon ones so you can tell them apart.

The stupid automatic flash whitens out the pink a little, but I'll get a new camera soon and toss away my broken one, I promise!

It's exhausting making mini cupcakes, they take forever to put into the tiny liners and then even more time to put tiny bits of icing on them and I really think flavour wise they are not as good, but they do look cute.

Speaking of tiny cupcakes, I went into a House shop the other day and noticed they had pastal cupcake liners in two small sizes, I asked the woman who worked there which ones fit into the mini muffins trays and she said they both do. So I got the slightly bigger ones and they don't fit. Bitch!

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I'm not baking for a while, I need a rest and besides I have to focus all of my attention on Mr T's permanent residency application, got it takes a lot of prove that we are in a real relationship, you would think that considering this is our 3rd immigration application we would be experts at it and it would be easy, but there are lots of little things like forgetting to keep the very few bits of mail that has been send to both of our names and forgetting to keep receipts from joint travel and why are there hardly any pics with Mr T and I and our friends or family? I have plenty of pics of just the two of us or him with others or me with others. If you are a friend who has pics of me and him and you, please email them to me or facebook me. At least this round doesn't cost thousands of dollars.

Oh yeah and I've also got to start my thesis again.

Hmmm, baking does sound like a better idea though :-)

Carrot Cake Cupcakes

I've agreed to make cupcakes for a baby shower/farewell party for someone at work on wed and decided to trial the carrot cake cupcakes from VCTOTW this weekend, boy I am glad that I did. I followed the recipe thinking that it looked like a tiny bit of batter but then I normally double cupcake recipes so I thought it might be that, but then I realised the texture was off too as I put the batter into 3 of the liners. I then did a bit of a google search and realised that others have had problems with this recipe and have suggested adding another cup of flour. I decided to do a bit of an experiment and leave the 3 original ones as they were and add half a cup of flour to the remaining batter and then compare. Here are the two types, the bottom one is made from the original recipe and was really oily almost like a deep fried cupcake and the above one has more flour. It still only made 8 small cupcakes.



Here are the nice ones with the cream cheese icing, which was yummy even though I only added about half of the sugar it asked for:


My only problem is getting the right amount of flour for the next batch for wed, has anyone tried with the 1 cup of flour and had success?

This is the first time that VCTOTW has disappointed me, it's normally like my baking bible.