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.