Babycakes and a Care Package

I'm at home sick with a sore head thanks to my sinuses, I've been taking garlic, horseradish and vitamin C tablets, eating green veggies and drinking tea that I made by grating fresh ginger and lemon zest into hot water. Hopefully this doesn't last much longer but I thought I'd take the time to blog while I sit on the couch with both cats on my lap :)

A few months ago I pre-ordered a copy of Babycakes, the new cookbook from the bakery of the same name, based in New York. It arrived last week and I was so very, very excited to get my paws on it.

It's a gorgeous hardcover book with lots of colour photos. There's a long introduction about how the bakery came about and the different ingredients used in the recipes.

The book is titled Babycakes - Vegan, Gluten-Free and (mostly) Sugar-Free recipes but not all of the recipes are gluten free, quite a few of them use spelt flour which isn't gluten free and some of the gluten free ones use Bob's Red Mill All Purpose Gluten Free mix, which is not available here but can be ordered online.

Despite that I decided to try the vanilla cupcakes first. The base of these is besan (chickpea/garbanzo) flour as well as rice flour, arrowroot and in total the cupcakes use 3.5 cups of flour for 24 regular cupcakes. The recipe also uses about half a jar of coconut oil and half a bottle of agave as the sweetener plus xanthum gum as a binder. The mix was very fluffy and I ended up making 12 regular cupcakes and 24 mini cupcakes with mix leftover.

I followed the recipe exactly and baked them for the required time. They develop a crust on them and inside they were quite dense and they smelt a bit beany. They were definitely edible but I don't think I would have given them to people to eat. Chris tried them later on and wasn't impressed but the cats liked them, I let them share a mini one.

I made the icing later that day, I added most of the ingredients to the food processor and then added the coconut oil and lemon juice but after blending for a while I could see the ingredients weren't coming together, instead it looked a bit like liquidy cottage cheese. I put the icing in the frige to chill anyway but a few hours later it was still lumpy. We had a bright idea to stick the mix into a saucepan and after heating the mix liquified and I then put it back in the fridge. The morning after it was a thick, airy spread and I was able to top a cupcake or two with it.

I wondered if the icing would liquify at room temperature so I left a cupcake out all day but the icing stayed on, which is great. The icing itself is sweet, almost buttery and is quite nice and I love that it's sugar free. My only issue is that the recipes uses soy milk and soy milk powder but the book does mention that they can be replaced with rice milk and rice milk powder. As far as I know there is now rice milk powder avail. in Australia so I will be ordering some from the USA so I can make these soy free as well.

I am going to try the vanilla cupcakes again another day but for now I will try a few of the other recipes as I have heard of good results with the choc chip cookies and the brownie bites. Chris wants me to make the strawberry shortcake (one of the spelt recipes) so I bought some spelt and will make those when I feel better.

And in more awesome news, my March PPK Care Package arrived yest'day! My partner, jcd, lives in Canada and I got some awesome treats, all gluten free too! I got gluten free pasta in cute shapes, sweet chilli rice crisps (yum!), Swedish berries (delicious raspberry jelly lollies), a jar of No Nuts Peabutter, some red quinoa, vitamin powder, a cinnamon roll Larabar, fruit strips and chews, a block of chocolate, a reusable shopping bag, a recipe for cheezy pasta and the Teany book! Such a great assortment of goods :)



As well as reciving my package I also got my copy of the Swell Vegan zine, woo! There are some very tasty looking recipes in this cute lil book and I look forward to trying them all.

And now I'm going to continue watching Scrubs and drinking ginger lemon tea :)