Vegan "Cadbury Egg" Cupcake
It isn’t my finest in food photography, but it may well be close to one of my finest (and most evil) in last minute kitchen thoughts. Yesterday, I was prompted to make a recipe for Vegan Cadbury Eggs found on the Made Just Right site (Earth Balance). Not requiring (or needing) the 24 eggs the recipe made, I quartered it (I should also note that I swapped out the corn syrup in the recipe for agave nectar).
Having made the filling, and deciding that I didn’t need two colors (white and yellow) to satisfy my curiosity, I began the process of melting down the chocolate (I also made an edit here since I didn’t have the shortening sticks the recipe called for and just used the buttery spread–made no difference from what I could tell). Since I do not own candy molds, and see no reason in the foreseeable future to invest in the dust collectors, I pulled out some cupcake papers to drop swirls of chocolate into for cooling/shaping purposes.
And that’s when the Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea. Oops, wrong holiday.
I ran to my trusty Happy Herbivore cookbook for the chocolate cupcake recipe. You can find that online here. I obviously skipped the mint in this holiday version and used vanilla. I also used the chocolate non dairy milk (because then I got to drink the extra I made–YAY). The only other edit I made was to skip the chocolate chips in the cupcakes and added an extra tablespoon of cocoa instead. They are perfectly delightful cupcakes with the chips in them, but since I knew I was using the chocolate “shell” in the middle of the cakes, I didn’t want to over power them.
With the cupcakes cooked and cooled, I cut 6 of them in half and spread some of the gooey “egg” filling on the bottom half, topped it with a chocolate “shell” and then spread more sugary, gooey yumminess on top of the shell and topped it again with the cupcake. I placed these back to the cupcake paper (from which I removed the chocolate shell) and set them in the cupcake pan to set up.
As they were sitting lovely in the cupcake pan, minus the one I taste tested, I decided they were not yet done. Frosting, I decided, would not lend the right consistency or flavor to these… and one of the things I used to love about Cadbury eggs was how over the top they were in sweetness. So with that, I whipped up a chocolate ganache. My ganache recipe is below, and it was exactly what the cupcakes called for. Never mind I couldn’t eat an entire cupcake in one (or two) sittings, they were and are amazingly sweet.
Since I didn’t use a ganache recipe from anyone else, here is how I made mine.
1/2 cup vegan chocolate chips
1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons unsweetened soy milk
3 heaping tablespoons powdered sugar
Heat chocolate and soy milk over medium flame until well combined and just before it starts to boil (chocolate will start to look glossy). Let cool about 5 minutes and stir in powdered sugar one heaping spoonful at a time until well incorporated. Use warm or when cooled further.
