Vanilla bean cupcake.
Cookie surprise in the middle.
Decadent cream cheese frosting. With more cookies.
I am so happy right now. 🙂
This comes with a warning though: this is not a healthy recipe. I’ll bet you had figured that one out already. Totally worth it though! Have a fun exception 🙂
Here’s a little lesson in easy vegan baking: you can find vegan store-bought cake mixes. Just read the ingredients labels, but Bob’s Red Mill and Arrowhead Mills, which you can find at most grocery stores now, have them – and both have a gluten free variety now, and both use organic ingredients. Score. If it calls for milk: any non-dairy milk. Calls for eggs: egg replacers like Ener-G or Bob’s Red Mill. Calls for butter: Earth Balance.
Now a little lesson in making those lower fat (still not healthy, but if you can cut the fat in a splurge without losing flavor, why not?!): replace half the oil that’s called for with unsweetened applesauce. You can replace up to all of the oil with applesauce, but it will start to make the cake gummier if you use much more than half applesauce. Then use a vegan egg replacer like Ener-G to replace the eggs that are called for. And you’ve just cut the fat waaaaaaaaaay down.
So you can use that as an excuse to plop a chocolate sandwich cookie at the bottom of your cupcake.
cake:
serves 12
1 package store-bought cake mix
1/2 C water
3 eggs’ worth Ener-G Egg Replacer
1/4 C canola oil
1/4 C unsweetened applesauce
1 vanilla bean
12 vegan chocolate sandwich cookies (Oreos, Trader Joe’s Joe-Joes, and Newman’s Own Creme Filled Sandwich Cookies are all vegan – there’s a GF variety of the Newman’s Own brand too)
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Mix all ingredients together. Put a cookie in the bottom of each muffin liner, then pour cake batter over it to the top of the muffin liner. The cookies took up quite a bit of room, so there was some extra batter left over.
Just share with a friend as a little snack – definite perk to no raw eggs in vegan batters. Mmmmm.
Bake for about 25 minutes or until cooked through.
frosting:
serves 12
1/2 C tofutti cream cheese
3 C powdered sugar
extra cookies for crumbling on top (optional)
Blend cream cheese and sugar together with a hand blender until smooth. Put in a piping bag (if you want), and frost cupcakes once they’re completely cool. Top with extra crumbles of cookies.
Nutrition facts per cupcake: Calories: 357; Calories from Fat: 95; Total Fat: 12.3g; Saturated Fat: 2.5g; Sodium: 427mg; Total Carbohydrates: 82.9g; Sugars: 58.0g; Protein: 3.4g
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