Gluten-free, Dairy-free Chocolate Cupcakes

Earlier today, I was tasked with making cupcakes as a birthday gift-type thing. Not just any cupcakes, either - gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate ones. That taste good. And aren't heavy like most gluten-free cakes are.

Simple.

So, after procrastinating scouring the internet for ideas, I stumbled upon this recipe (the second one, actually) in a forum, that had the upsides of sounding reasonable, and containing only ingredients I already have. While there are a lot of recipes out there that have delicious-looking photos, I have no clue where to get potato starch when it isn't 10pm, and I refuse to use things I've never heard of, like xanthum? gum.

In any case, I found a recipe, and started cooking, making some minor modifications, and baked up a batch of 6 to trial them. Rowan, my dedicated taste-tester, declared them "good", before knowing that they were gluten-free. I declared them slightly chewy, but otherwise acceptable, and continued to bake up the rest of the batch.

Allergy-friendly Chocolate Cupcakes

1&1/2 cups gluten-free self-raising flour
1/2 cup gluten-free cocoa
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup caster sugar
125 gm melted butter or margarine, cooled
1 cup milk (dairy, rice or soy))
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs

1. Preheat your oven to 180C, and prepare your baking trays.
2. Sift together flour, cocoa, and baking powder. Stir in the sugar, and make a well in the centre.
3. Whisk in butter, milk, and vanilla essence. I used Nuttlex, soy milk, and a generous splash of concentrated vanilla essence. Never use imitation vanilla - you can taste the difference.
4. Whisk in the eggs, one at a time. If you feel paranoid about your cake not being light and fluffy, you could beat the batter with a hand mixer for a few minutes, but it's not necessary.
5. Divide the batter into patty pans, and bake for 15-20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Most of my batches took closer to 15 than 20 minutes to bake, so keep an eye on them. Allow to cool in the pans for a few minutes, then turn onto wire racks.

I left mine to cool overnight before icing them. I don't really believe in recipes for icing - I took a vast quantity of Nuttlex (around a tub's worth) and beat it with a hand-beater for a while. I added icing sugar to taste. Then I threw in a large spoon of cocoa, some chocolate essence, some vanilla essence, and some more sugar. I beat it some more. This continues until you like the taste. Then I filled a piping bag with a star tip, and began piping away. I really need to practice my piping some more, but they turned out O.K.. My loyal taste-tester says that they're "disturbingly good" for gluten and dairy-free things, and that it'd be hard to pick them in a blind taste test. Now, all I have to do is wait for them to set, and deliver them. I'll add an update with responses once I get them.

Update: they were very popular. Next time, I might re-think my icing to cake ratio - there was a bit too much icing. Just a little.

Introduction

Well, the last blog I tried didn't really work. I think it's because the subject matter was so very limited. Which is why this shiny new blog will be a recording of many of my projects, mostly for my own benefit, because what good's an experiment if the results can't be replicated? Hopefully there'll be some interesting things here soon, since I have a few plans to turn into reality.