Easy vegan cupcake recipe

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved baking. I never made anything terribly complicated but I used to love making scones and biscuits with my mum when I was younger and trying recipes on my own as I got older. Unfortunately the transition to vegan baking hasn’t been so easy.

Even though my mum doesn't follow a plant based diet, she has taken on the challenge of mastering vegan baking on my behalf and is doing really well. She’s made some amazing cakes over the last few years from several different recipes to figure out which works best because there are so many different ones to choose from. That’s another thing about vegan baking, whereas most normal cake recipes include flour, butter, sugar, and eggs, with vegan baking it sometimes feels like you can throw any combination of ingredients into a bowl and somehow come out with a cake.

Because vegans don't eat butter or eggs, people much smarter than me have figured out a seemingly endless list of alternatives to use in recipes. Unfortunately this often changes the whole composition of the recipe so you end up having to buy eleven ingredients to bake instead of four. Off the top of my head, some of the ingredients I’ve bought in the past as alternatives that I never needed for traditional baking have included apple sauce (I didn’t even know this was a thing), golden syrup, agave syrup, sunflower oil, and even diet coke.

Don’t get me wrong, when you follow these recipes accurately, nine times out of ten you end up with amazing food. For a charity bake sale last year a friend and I baked the most incredible gluten free vegan peanut butter brownies which were nicer than any brownies I'd ever has with the traditional ingredients. However the downside was that it did cost us about a tenner to make enough brownie mix to barely even fill the tin.

So I have cheated and adapted a really simple cake recipe to make an even simpler vegan cake recipe. They're not fancy but it's a perfect go to recipe if you want a quick pick me up with ingredients you probably already have in the house.

Ingredients

Cakes

100g dairy free margarine

100g caster sugar

75g self raising flour

25g cocoa powder

1 tsp of baking powder

½ cup of mashed banana

Butter Icing 
75g icing sugar
25g cocoa powder
75g dairy free margarine 
Raspberries for decoration

1. Cream the margarine and sugar together in a mixing bowl until combined.
2. Mix the dry ingredients and then add half to the mixing bowl with half of the mashed banana and whisk.

3. Repeat this step for the other half of the banana and dry ingredients.

4. Spoon the mixture into 12 cupcake cases and cook at 180c for 20-25 minutes.

The cakes don’t rise terribly well but they have a gooey brownie-like texture in the middle when I think makes up for it. They might not impress all your pals of your amazing baking abilities but if you get in after work one day and you’re craving chocolate cake and you want to get rid of the banana that’s going brown in your fruit bowl then this is the recipe for you.

In terms of icing the cakes, there are a few options depending on how lazy you want to be. You can whisk icing sugar and cocoa powder with dairy free margarine to make butter icing and and pipe it onto the cakes, which is what I chose to do this time with a raspberry on top for a bit more aesthetic appeal. However, usually I just buy a tub of Betty Crocker's chocolate fudge icing and smother them haphazardly with that instead. The one bad thing about that method is that you’re then left with a pretty full tub of icing and if you’re anything like me you’ll use that as an excuse to make cakes every four days for the next two weeks. But at least you will always have cake!