Zucchini Muffins, Halloween Cupcakes and Yoga Soup (Again!)

I may be lacking creativity lately but my daughter is not. She decided to make Vanilla cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and she even planned to make her own vegan buttercream frosting. Sadly, the vegetable shortening had some sort of strange growth developing on it (I know...EW!!!) so we switch to store bought vanilla frosting and she added some colors to make it festive. Overall, I think she did a great job!

This morning I attended a book club and made the chocolate zucchini muffins from Happy Herbivore that Anu has mentioned a few times before. I thought it would be a nice tribute since she could not attend this meeting. I added some chocolate chips to the mix too. Seems to me that one type of the Ghirardelli chips does not contain any milk products so I have been buying them. Also halved the sugar and they were still sweet (13 year old ate without complaint....success to me!). I did not get a picture of these since I made them first thing in the morning and then had to rush to the brunch meeting. They did not have much of a banana flavor to me but I love bananas so I'm not sure I would mind.

Tonight for dinner we had Yoga Soup from Vegweb.com which I must have blogged about before. My daughter loves it and my husband tolerates it so I continue to make it. I added shredded carrots and cabbage (still have some from my cabbage fest last week!) and used a handful of stir fry rice noodles that were milling around in the cupboard. I like the steaming photo although when I see this pot here I realize I should have thrown it out years ago!

Cup cakes and Glaze

My brother and sister-in-law were in town for a long weekend (and we spent a day with them in Chicago too) - they requested a few dishes. None were vegan, though. So for a sweet treat, I decided to make vegan chocolate cup cakes with glaze.
The recipe for the cupcakes are from this recipe in the New York Times. I got the recipe for the glaze from a friend. I know she got it from 'the web', but I don't have the link... sorry to the original author!
Here is the recipe for the glaze-



Ingredients:
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup cocoa powder, sifted
1/4 cup water
1/4 t cider vinegar
1/8 t salt
1 T Kalhua (Optional)
2 t Vanilla

Heat maple syrup and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and whisk in cocoa powder, water, vinegar and salt. Cook for additional 2-3 minutes. Remove from heat and add Kalhua (the original recipe called for Coffee liquer, but I only had Kalhua) and vanilla. Cool for 5-10 minutes.

In the day that we had access to the cupcakes and glaze, half of them were eaten by the non-vegans around me - a testament to how good they tasted!!

Cupcake recipe!!

Emily, you were right about the cupcakes - they were from a website and based on 'Vegan cupcakes take over the world' by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.
Here are the links -


Basic Vegan Cupcake

Vegan Buttercream Frosting

Thanks for the deliciousness, Claudia and Kadie!!