Valentine’s Day Cupcakes
Who doesn’t love a sweet and tasty cupcake?! You can make so many different flavors with cupcakes and they're generally pretty easy to whip together. Since Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, I thought I would go with the theme. We love something sweet every now and then and my husband is trying to eat less gluten, after discovering that he has a gluten sensitivity. So I used gluten free flour in this recipe.
I found a recipe for Vegan Raspberry Almond Cupcakes from the Crowded Kitchen. The cupcakes are light and fluffy and the buttercream frosting is pretty and delicious! To make the frosting pink, she used freeze-dried raspberries and ground them into a powder. Genius! I imagine you can use this method for anything you need colored with frostings or cakes. You could use beet root powder (for pinks), spirulina powder (for green), or freeze-dried blueberries (for blue). This offers a healthier and more natural option compared to food coloring dyes which are petroleum based. The safety of their consumption is highly controversial, with studies linking them to allergies, cancer-causing substances, and hyperactivity in children. Most of these colors are numbered (ex: Blue 2, Red 3, Yellow 5) and you can find them on food packaging labels. This is why it is so important to read food labels! Food manufacturers like to sneak these colorants into beverages, candy, and foods. Shame on our regulatory agencies for allowing this! Food dyes are banned in Europe and Australia, they use more natural coloring compounds. Here is a list of other banned ingredients that are still used in the U.S. Sadly, our FDA regulation is out of control. They have a general rule that food companies can add food additives to our food WITHOUT FDA APPROVAL as long as “the substance is generally recognized, among qualified experts, as having been adequately shown to be safe…” (Insert confused look on my face). So many questions with this statement! How is the substance generally recognized? By who? Who are these “qualified experts”? How do you know this “substance” is safe? Are you testing it on animals? On people? Do you know the long term effects of this substance on the human body? Heck! Do you know short term effects? Where did these substances come from? How are you making them? Oh I could go on and on! It baffles me and scares me to know I consumed these and probably still do without realizing! We can only try our best, these companies literally sneak this stuff in everywhere. I have gotten much better at reading food labels and watching out for sketchy ingredients. The best thing about making a whole foods, plant based meal is there are no labels to read! You know exactly what your eating and don’t need a label to tell you that.
I went down quite the rabbit hole of food colorants and additives there! I just believe it is very important for us know what is in our food. Seeing how nutrition affects the human body is fascinating to me. When I read in Dr. Michael Gregor’s book, How Not to Die, that heart disease (even in advanced stages) could be reversible, my jaw literally dropped and it lit a spark in me! I’ve seen so many patients suffer and go through multiple surgeries and have complications, I didn’t know why nutrition wasn’t being more talked about. Why are people not talking about this? Why is this not a headline on every news channel?? Then I realized after watching many documentaries and reading many articles that apple farms don’t pay as well as big food companies such as Pepsi, Tyson, Kraft, or Nestle, to name a few. These companies have financial ties within the industry and government, basically allowing them to get away with whatever they want to make a profit.
I need a delicious and “healthier” cupcake to cheer me up now! Let’s get baking!
Vegan Raspberry Almond Cupcakes
For the Cupcakes:
1/2 cup of vegan butter
1 cup coconut sugar or cane sugar
1 1/2 tsp almond extract
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup almond milk (or other plant based milk)
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 cups Gluten-free baking flour
3/4 cup almond flour
1/2 cup oat flour
1/2 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 cups fresh raspberries
For the frosting:
1 cup vegan butter, softened to room temp
2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup raspberries
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 tsp plant based milk
pinch of salt
Preheat oven to 335 degrees and line a muffin pan.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together gluten free flour, almond flour, oat flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.
Blend butter, sugar, almond extract, and vanilla extract together in mixer until creamy.
Stir lemon juice into plant based milk and set aside.
Add half of the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and blend. Add applesauce and continue mixing. Add remaining dry ingredients, then add milk and lemon juice, and continue mixing until a batter forms. Let the batter sit for 15-20 minutes if using gluten free flour.
Meanwhile rinse raspberries and pat them dry with a paper towel. You may coat them in 1 tablespoon of gluten free flour then gently fold them into the batter. This may help them from becoming mushy and seperate to much in the batter. Add batter to lined muffin tins, filling about 3/4 full.
Bake for 28-30 minutes. Remove from over and let cool completely before frosting.
To make frosting, beat softened butter until creamy.
In a food processer pulse freeze-dried raspberries until they form a powder. Add raspebrry powder and powedered sugar to butter, mix until creamy. Add vanilla, plant based milk, and a pinch of salt.
When cupcakes are completely cooled, then frost the cupcakes!
Leftover cupcakes can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 5 days.
