G/F Mint Choc Cupcakes and My New Toy

For my birthday I received a group gift from all of my fam and Toby, a 90th anniversary special edition kitchen aid. The colour is called candy appple red, it is metallic red unlike the regular red ones. This pic really doesn't do it justice:



So I felt that I had to bake something for the vegan bake off, since it was the day after my birthday. Mind you I have never baked gluten free before except for packet mixtures. I made the chocolate gluten free cupcakes from VCTOTW but used coconut milk instead of soy milk because I think I read somewhere that Mandee the gleegan (g/f and vegan) baking goddess does that.

But boy did I have issues, when I went to take out the cupcakes I realised that the temperature had dropped significantly so the cupcakes were cooked on the top but were liquidy on the bottom. So I had to put them back in until they were burnt on top and I could taste the quinoa flour, yucky!

I decided to make choc mint cupcakes because I saw this cute idea on martha stewart website for choc mint leaves but couldn't get it to work. First the choc chips from Rishons don't melt properly and then when I switched to lindt, I couldn't peel the mint leaves away from the chocolate. There was lots of swearing at this point.

I followed the recipe for the mint icing, but am pretty sure that the recipe is incorrect, no amount of mixing would take away the gritty texture. I thought I must have done something wrong so made another batch and had the same problem, I'm petty sure it needs more margarine. I added more margarine and it was slightly better but then too runny so it wouldn't pipe properly.

So nothing went right, I was cursing myself for wasting precious thesis time on baking and actually said to Toby 'I'm not going to enter, this is just embarrassing' but he convinced me to enter anyway.

I got to the bake off, and there was only one other gluten free entry: my friend bec's yummy banana bread. She also had issues as she couldn't find any ripe bananas, but I thought it was yummy. Lots of others have blogged about their dishes and many others but I can't comment on their dishes since I couldn't try them :-( I did get to try the amazing raw entries though like the amazing winning choc coconut slice/cake entry and my friend Kylie's raw mint choc cheesecake made from cashews.

I won the gluten free category which I'm pretty sure is just because of the cupcake factor not because my dish was very good, I even heard a few people critique them which is really not very nice people, I know that they sucked, I don't need to be reminded! My gluten free baking has a long long way to come.

There was a young gleegan girl though who was excited about being able to eat cupcakes, I'm sorry that they weren't so great. And to the gleegan girl's mother I lost your email address but would to know more about the vegan brand of probiotics from the US.

Pic taken from Danni (I was too annoyed and frustrated to take any pics)


The one thing that I am happy with is the cupcake liners from House. aren't they purty?