Vegan Rainbow Cupcakes!!! :D

So, a couple of weeks ago, bunny bought me some silicone cupcake cups. I was so excited. But its taken me a week and a half to actually use them, because I couldn't decide what to make first. Last night I was flipping through the cookbook that came with it(which is mostly just ways to use fondant and decorate cupcakes), and I found rainbow cupcakes. It was just a rainbow on the frosting made out of colored fondant, but it got me thinking. So I got on the internet trying to find a simple recipe to make multicolored cupcakes, and I found it. I learned a long time ago from the best cook on the planet(my mom) that recipes are just suggestions; a starting point to get the ball rolling, as long as your a good enough cook to not mess things up(like filling a meatloaf with vegetables and calling it confetti meatloaf). So, due to me not having main staples in the house currently(eggs, butter, milk, vanilla, etc.) I changed it, and unintentionally they became completely vegan, which I'm totally okay with. And they are some of the best cupcakes I've ever tasted. I promised one of my good friends one of them, and literally had to wrestle bunny away from eating the last one, so my friend still gets one. lol.

So here's my recipe for Vegan Rainbow Cupcakes.

4 Tbsp water
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 tsp cornstarch
1 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup vanilla soy milk(or unsweetened soy milk + 1 tsp vanilla)
red, yellow, green and blue food colorings


Preheat oven to 350F. Grease 10 cups from a 12 cup muffin tin (or line with paper cups)(i used my silicone baking cups).

In a large bowl,stir together 4 Tbsp water, 2 Tbsp vegetable oil, & 2 tsp cornstarch until completely smooth(this step is extremely important, as is it is the 'eggs' and has to be together before anything else is added or you'll not get the right consistency).

Add in 1/2c sugar, 1/2c vegetable oil, 1/2c soy milk, and 1 tsp vanilla extract if your soy milk isn't vanilla flavored and stir until smooth.

Whisk in the 1c flour, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, and 1/4 tsp salt and stir entire mixture until just combined.


Divide batter evenly into 6 small bowls; each should have about 1/3 cup batter (approx 5 tbsp or so for each).

Add about 1/4 tsp food coloring to each bowl to make red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple batters. Stir well, so no streaks of plain batter remain. Add additional food coloring to make the colors as vibrant as you want.

Starting with the purple batter, add a small spoonful to each of the 10 greased muffin cups (just over 1/2 tbsp in each). Repeat with all remaining colors, working from blue to green to yellow to orange to red, adding each subsequent spoonful on top of the previous color. Do not attempt to spread the layers of color out (as it can cause layers to combined), but allow them to spread on their own.

Bake for about 15 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.(using my silicone cups, mine had to cook for about 20-ish minutes, but if you listen to the toothpick, you'll be great).

Cool cupcakes on a wire rack before frosting. (If using silicone cups, take them out of the pan you're using, let them sit for a couple minutes, then turn them out of the cups to let them cool before decorating them)

So here I am with my pretty little colorful cupcakes, and hadn't even thought about how to frost them. I don't have any fondant to do the cuteness from the book, so I returned to the internet. I found one lady who smeared lines of food coloring gel on the inside of the decorating bag and filled it with white frosting and it came out in little rainbows, but my food color is liquid.I also didn't feel like making seventeen different colors of frosting.

It was getting to be about 10PM and I was tired, so I decided to be lazy. I just made a really easily delicious frosting, put it in a sandwich bag, cut off the end, and squirted it on.

Easily Delicious Frosting.

4 cups confectioners' sugar
1 cup shortening
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon clear imitation vanilla extract(since I still didn't have any vanilla, I just used a 1 tsp of my vanilla soy milk and do not regret it one bit)

In a large bowl, combine sugar, shortening, water and vanilla. Beat on low speed to combine, then beat on medium speed for a full five minutes. It won't look like Icing at first, but keep the mixer going for a full five minutes, and then you're done! 



So here's what they looked like then:

Annnnnnnd I felt lazy. I felt like this plain white stuff just didn't do justice to the colorfulness underneath. So I decided to decorate them. However, being without sprinkles, I improvised again(I do that a lot)

So I took my liquid food coloring, and the back end of a wooden appetizer fork thing(the closest thing I own to toothpicks) and put one drop of each color in a small bowl separate from each other, and dipped the wooden thing in the coloring and made my own permanent sprinkles. Yay!

They turned out deliciously adorable.

 And that is my story of deliciously adorable, 100% vegan, make-it-with-what-you've-got, rainbow cupcakes. Enjoy!

6/20/2012

I just want to die. Well, not literally. But I want to sleep so deeply that I could be pushed onto the floor and have things thrown at me without me even starting to wake up. Oh wait; that's how I normally sleep. Oh well. I'm tired.

Today was a lo-o-ong day. Since it was bunny's day off, we spent the whole day working on the house so it's nice when his family comes. We really didn't get a whole lot of different things finished; but we knocked out two of the larger things that had been overwhelming me and therefore preventing me from getting anything else done: the kitchen and dining room. I got some more of those containers from yesterday to put the rest of my dry foods in; and there was a garage sale across the street selling a 5 shelf bookcase that was perfectly sized for the canisters. $5. WIN!.

So, on the kitchen. Something that we have wayyy too much of is dishes. so many that it allows us to go long periods of time, surviving without washing any dishes. Bad idea. BAD. IDEA. There was a storage rubbermaid, 2 boxes, and a counter covered in dishes. It literally took us all day with him washing and me drying/putting away. I hate dishes. Especially since the drain in the kitchen is entirely stopped up. We actually just took a section of the pipe off and put a large bucket under the sink to catch the water and that's how we did the dishes. It's annoying having to continually empty dirty dishwater out back, but it is what it is.

We moved in 3 weeks ago, and still aren't unpacked yet. It's bugging me. But today I realized that there was still two large boxes full of shelf food that were inherited from bunny's old roommate, still just chillin'. So that was my feat today: The food. Since I got that new shelf set from the garage sale, that opened up my little white bookcase to hold more stuff so it doesn't all have to attempt to fit on the big brown one my dad liberated from the bank. (our kitchen literally has 1 cupboard with 2 shelves, plus(thankfully) a china cabinet in the dining room just big enough for all the dishes, so for food storage I'm stuck with bookcases, just like I was when I lived in that crappy studio apartment down in old town) My food storage now looks nice. I'm so happy. I also organized and cleaned out the fridge/freezer. I can now attempt to seem like a civilized person. :D

(passed my drug test for that factory temp job, but found out that the schedule is already filled for this week. But they also warned me that they may call at 7:00 tomorrow morning if they decide they need another person. YAY)

I got flipped off. It was great. So I'm riding my scooter down Olympus, and this car is right on my tail. Like as close as you'd dare get to someone at a stop light. It was pissing me off. And I was going like 39 in a 35 zone so it wasn't that I was going too slow. Well, we get up to the stop light and I'm fuming(I have terrible road rage, especially on my scooter, because people are dumb). The car was turning left so they pulled up next to me at the light. I look over, and their window is down. So I may or may not have yelled something to the effect of if he's gonna ride my a$$ he better at least buy me dinner first. May or may not have. If you are my mother reading this, just assume the second option. ;D   Anyways, he turns to me, and flips me off before he drives away, and at that moment< I realized it was my ex. Made. My. Day.

Later in the afternoon, some missionaries stopped by, and helped move the huge brown bookcase from the kitchen to the dining room, which I'd been trying to convince bunny to help me do. My 20 square-foot kitchen only has so much space. blarg. They also questioned me about the books in the front room titled 'Mormon America' and 'Mormonism for Dummies'. I just laughed a little and told them they were textbooks. Even they were shocked to find out there actually is an anthropology of Mormonism class. lol

OH! Also at that garage sale, I got some cool handmade rugs. One is small and I put it on the landing on the top of the stairs, and the other matches it exactly and is big enough to cover up some crappy wood floor. PUMPED!

I guess we got a little more done today than I originally implied. Bunny swept the back patio, which looks SO MUCH BETTER. We finally got the boxes out of the hallway so you can walk to the bathroom without dying. Now that I think about it, I've no idea where they went. But I'm not complaining, because they're gone! :) The front room proved it has carpet, because we got the random stuff picked up off of the floor. And bunny fixed the toilet so now you don't have to reach in the back to pull on the chain to flush it.

OH! MY CAR! I took it to the mechanic today, so he can figure out exactly what's wrong with it. Getting it there was an adventure in and of itself. I had to have bunny follow me all the way from the highland area down to Chubbuck with both of our hazards flashing. It sputtered all the way up to 20 mph. I was so proud. *tear* It was great.

Well, that's my boring day of getting stuff done that had been put off. So much more work left to go on the house. AHHHH! Anyone wanna come help me strip paint off of the stairs before Saturday? haha. My feet and back hurt really bad though, so I'm closing the computer. Goodnight! :D

PS I'm going to post pictures of the house when its clean, just so I can be vain and prideful. Shoot me.

6/19/2012

SO.. .. ..
I hate catching up on telling about anything. I try to hurriedly get it over with, and end up feel like I'm stumbling, and eventually my face meets the ground quite painfully. So I refuse to do it. Here is me just jumping in.

Today was a GREAT day. So, I was randomly job searching the interweb, and Sherwin Williams over in Chubbuck is hiring. BF had already gone to work; so I was like, "What they hey?" and headed over. I guess literally all it takes is trying, because as I'm sitting there filling out my application, my phone rings and its the temp agency that I haven't heard word one from in over a month. So now I have to go drug test tomorrow and I start temping at Heinz probably Thursday morning. **yay factory work!!!** A job is a job, right?

Then I decided to dawdle a little bit, and went to the dollar store, where I almost always find inspiration. Lucky me found containers and decided to get creative. In an attempt to make my kitchen not look like the trunk of a car leaving the grocery store, I spent 10.6 of my precious few dollars. I got 4 of each big and smaller containers with screw on lids, and two rolls of patterned sticky-back shelf liner(don't judge me yet). As I was shelling out over half of the moneys I have to my name, I remembered I rode my scooter there. LOL. I got so many weird looks on the street. It was probably only because i couldn't put my feet on the floorboards so my legs were outstretched straight ahead like a little kid on the carpet during story time.

Okay, SO. You know in the movies, how a horrific accident injures your main character and you think they'll never walk again. Then there's that magnificently triumphant moment where the patient slowly, struggling, painfully, but independently walks down the hallway clinging to the handrail? (Okay so I've no idea what, if any, movie that is from but just go with it) I had a moment like that today. It was great. I drove my car all the way around the block! My car has been out of service since spring break when my family made the mistake of leaving my oldest brother home while we went to Salt Lake. When we came home, my car wouldn't start, and made funny smells. Daddy came to the conclusion that ..SOMEONE.. had put something in the gas tank. Then on top of that the battery was broken. So we replaced that and then the next day, the battery was dead again so we were like, "shit. must be an electrical problem." (electrical problems in cars are supposedly expensive to locate and fix) Dad advised me to get my $150 out of my car at the steel recycling place. This actually brought me to tears. This Taurus is my first car(that ran for more than 30 hours after purchasing it). $500 that I earned showering the elderly, and he wanted me to throw it away!? Well, FYI I'm very glad I was dragging my feet about removing it from my parents' curb, because today my dad realized that the battery was dead because we put a brand new battery in a car without starting it or charging the battery at all! So now we're back to the fuel problem which is hopefully easy to fix. THEN I'LL HAVE A CAR AGAIN!!!! I mean, sure; I have my scooter which gets 4-5 times the gas mileage anyways. And sure; my parents have let me borrow their little white cavalier ever since mine broke. But its just not the same not having your own car. I can't explain it. Maybe I'm just shallow and materialistic. Oh well. I miss my car. And even though flooring the gas pedal only made it sputter about 3mph through the neighborhood, it felt so good to know it is willing to move. ^-^

Wondering how big of a mess I made with those containers? Answer-LARGE. Oh well I'll clean it up. But my containers look gorgeous! I absolutely love DIY stuff. Each of these only cost me $1.25 before taxes. :D

I also am still covered in flour from trying to wrestle it from a bag into a gallon container, but it brings back memories of filming 'Night of the Living Textbook'; at HHS until 1 am multiple days in a row; leaving messes of flour(zombie makeup) in the boys bathroom; hanging my ex-boyfriend because, as scriptwriter, I had that authority. Ahhhhh sophomore year. lol

BF's family is coming into town this weekend. (AHHHHHHHH!!!!)
I obviously could have better spent my time today by cleaning the house, hiding the hole in the floor that used to be occupied by a toilet, unpacking boxes that have been procrastinated against for the past 3 weeks, washing dishes, stripping paint off of the stairs, putting together that last end table, or many other things that would make the place presentable. However, I am a procrastinator. My fourth grade teacher used to call me the absent-minded professor. lol. Don't get me wrong. I am super stressed about this weekend. Not only have I been told that if his mother decides not to like me, he will break up with me because of how much he loves his mommy; its her birthday this weekend and she is making the 3.5 hour trip from Boise to come here with her husband, lets add some more.His sister and her BF are also coming for the weekend. Dear fate: I realize that you hate me, and like to pick on me at inopportune times, but if you could please please PLEASE leave me alone, just this weekend, that would be GReat. I really want to impress these people and not make them be all like "OMG she's so GROSS! Leave her and you deserve better and she is so weird and clumsy and ugly and unsociable and everything else bad!" Alright, so that was a little much, but you catch my drift. Nervous.

Well, its late, and someone is about to get home from work. I'm anxious to see if he meant what he told me last night. He wanted to go play an online game with his baby brother in Boise instead of playing another board game with me, so he said he'll play one board game with me every night when he gets home from work. Sounds so fun right? I <3 boardgames + spending time with bunny. Well, Goodnight!

<3/Cooki