Greetings, Salutations, and Sweet Introductions

Greetings, and welcome to our little corner of the internet.  As this is primarily a food blog, most of what we will be posting about is food, with the occasional nugget of eco-friendly joy and the off gripe about life in general. On a side note, I (Sara) am a spectacular cook, but I have no experience baking.  I will be posting for your reading pleasure both my triumphs and tragedies, my successes and failures, my FTW’s and FML’s. 

For our inaugural post, we decided cupcakes were the way to go. Cupcakes are ALWAYS the way to go.

Since Stefanie is deeply immersed in her condensed summer class schedule at the moment, I went solo on this one. It was my first real ‘from scratch” baking attempt. No cheating… no shortcuts… all experimentation.  My kitchen will forever be known as the laboratory. Lab-or-a-tory. Like a mad scientist.

So, since we are all perpetually watching our figures, this cake contains only ¾ cup of sugar in the entire batch and is completely gluten free. I’ve Googled it and apparently Vanilla Extract is GF, something to do with the distillation process… however, if you are sensitive, I would use an alternative just in case, or do the research yourself to make sure you are comfortable using it. Neither Stefanie nor myself are gluten intolerant, we just recognize that it is the devil and shouldn’t be in frigg’n EVERYTHING we buy.

But I digress. Here is the recipe for my experimental Butter-Fig cupcakes:

·         1 cup Pureed Fig (preferably fresh (you can also use Dates), but dried will work if you soak them in water overnight… or Rum if you are feeling frisky, but I haven’t tried that yet… and that would make it not GF. You can substitute 1c of raw, organic sugar or 1c of agave syrup if you want a lighter colored cake)  It will be thick. Add 1/3 cup of water to make the pureeing process easier.

·         1/4 cup Butter, room temp

·         2 Eggs

·         2 teaspoons Vanilla Extract

·         1 cup GF Baking Flour  (I used Bobs Red Mill)

·         ½ cup Almond Flour (Also Bobs…)

·         1 3/4 teaspoons Baking Powder (look for a GF brand with no Aluminum; yes BP has gluten in it… I know, right? ug.)

·         3/4 cup Milk (I used half almond and half coconut milk, but you can use regular milk if you want. I just don’t care for cow’s milk so I never have it in the house. To be honest, it doesn’t care for me either…)

Blend together the fig puree and the butter. Your life will be a thousand times easier if you have an electric mixer or even a hand mixer (you know, the ones with the turn crank? I totally want one of those… I used my blender.) Beat the 2 eggs together and add to the butter/fig mix, then toss in the vanilla extract.

In a separate bowl, mix the dry stuff together until well incorporated. Now, dump it in the wet stuff. Stir until smooth, adding the milk as you go. This will be a thicker batter, if that makes you uncomfortable, you can add about a ¼ cup more milk, but I wouldn’t mess with it beyond that. I have no idea what will happen.  I’m still new to this.

Preheat your oven to 350 and line a muffin tin with paper liners (this will make 12 cupcakes). You will notice in the photo that I have not used any liners… something else I forgot at the store. Folks with young children will understand this phenomenon. Just grease with a little butter and these babies will fall right out once they’ve cooled. Bake for 20 – 25 minutes. I live just a hair above a mile-high and I took mine out a 22 minutes, and cooking times seem to go up as your elevation does, so definitely check this at 20 minutes, maybe even 15 if you are at sea level. 

Now, for the magic on top. My intention was to make a cream cheese frosting, but since I forgot it at the store and didn’t feel like going back out, I improvised. It’s a little weird, unless you have done this before (but since most of us get our frosting from a tub…) it needs to be “cooked”.

·         2 tablespoons of GF flour

·         ¾ cup of Milk

·         ¾ cup Sugar (or Agave syrup) (I actually did half of each)

·         ¾ cup Butter, room temp

·         1/8 teaspoon of Salt

·         1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract

Turn you burner to medium heat and put a little milk in a small sauce pan.  Add the flour, stir until a smooth paste forms, then add the rest of the milk and stir constantly until it “boils” (it should only take a couple minutes), then remove from heat and cool. I stuck mine in the fridge while I prepped the rest. Blend together the butter, salt, vanilla extract and sugar (or agave…) until very smooth. Here is where that electric mixer will come in handy again. Add this mixture to the cooled milk mixture and blend some more. It will be creamy and difficult to resist eating right out of the bowl.  The boy (my 1 ½ year old son) thoroughly enjoyed licking the spoon and I didn’t feel guilty in the least.

Once the cupcakes have cooled (they will look a bit like muffins), get that frosting and spread away.  Now, enjoy the fruits of you labor.

The taste test: Interesting. It’s moist, fluffy and light, yet slightly muffiny. Its nice, but very rich, any more than 1 and you will have a tummy ache for sure. I am truly pleased with this neutral cupcake, though it’s not as cupcakey as I would like, gotta tweak the flour ratios.  I think that it’s a good starting point for other flavors… blueberry,  raspberry, strawberry… if you use agave instead of figs, lemon would be a good direction to go. Oh yes. This will get explored.

As this was my first actual time baking anything from scratch, and it happened to be a success, I will try not to let it go to my head.  I couldn’t tell you how long the prep time for this recipe is as I am a stay at home mom and the boy can be quite demanding, this took me about an hour and a half, with many stops and starts. I would suppose you can expect half that, maybe less, especially if you are an experienced baker.

Please, if you try to make this, post your experience in a comment. We’d love to hear how this worked out for others.

~SR~

** A fun aside:

I read an article a while ago on OrganicAuthority that made me so happy. Disney World is giving fast food the boot in favor of cupcakes. There is a sweet (pardon the pun) company that makes cupcakes that are free of refined sugar, gluten-free, wheat-free, soy-free, vegan and kosher. If someone can make a cupcake that captures the attention of a mega-corp like Disney then not only must it be good, but it must serve as an inspiration to us all.