The great vegan cupcake and other coconut butter stories

My friend Claire gave me some organic coconut butter. It was pure white and smelled delicious, like an expensive hand cream. But the only thing I can do with coconut butter is vegan puff pastry, and that's take time...also it is too hot now to make puff pastry! I wanted to try something different.

For my first experiment I tried some muffins, and used some standard ingredients: egg, sugar, milk, self rising flour...and coconut butter instead of normal butter.

Well, what can I say, they were...ok, but nothing more. The fact is that they were too rich for my taste (I am extremely fussy), too 'greasy'. They were eaten, of course, by family and friends, but I wouldn't make them again, so I won't bother with the recipe.

I gather that if coconut butter is so rich, maybe I could try to bake something without using other 'rich' ingredients like eggs and milk. (And if I failed again I would make hand cream!).

I had some coconut butter in a bowl, so I melted it in the oven. When melted, coconut butter becomes liquid, and very clear.

I measured 150ml of coconut 'oil'. I felt that my muffins would be very white, so I decided to use raw (brown) sugar for colour. Also I felt that, without the eggs, possibly I would not get really 'high' muffins, so I opted for cupcakes, used cupcake paper cups and planned a topping.

Vegan Cupcakes with Coconut Butter

Ingredients

150 ml melted coconut butter

100 g raw cane sugar

200 g self-rising flour

150 ml water

few drops of pure vanilla essence

Cherry jam

Using an electric beater mix the still warm and melted coconut butter with the sugar, then add the self rising flour and water, making sure that you don't get any lumps. Finally add a few drops of vanilla and divide the batter into 12 cupcake cases. Top each cupcake with a little cherry jam.

Bake at 180°C for approximately 20 minutes (check with a toothpick to see if the cupcakes are cooked). They will look quite pale! I tried one hot, then cold, They were light and fragrant, with a subtle hint of coconut. They keep soft for two days, after I don't know, we ate them all!

Decorating

No much time to think about this actually, I had guests for dinner and I was too busy with the main and dessert to indulge in further experiments. But I had some ready made Wilton Decorating Icing which, by reading the ingredients, looked vegan to me...so I just used that and a fresh cherry.

I rarely use ready made icing, and if I do it is generally white. Possibly next time I will just make some butter icing with coconut butter and sugar syrup, or just coconut butter and icing sugar. When I get more coconut butter, that is :-)! For now I am content with the cupcake "base", toppings will always change!

How to make Rose Turkish Delights (Lokum), and Sweet New Zealand

Rose Turkish Delights (Lokum) Before I start I would like to say that I don't have a sugar thermometer, essential if you are really into confectionery, and that I didn't use much sugar for these Turkish delights. Many recipes use much more sugar, and it is not that I wanted to make a low sugar treat here (it is still pretty sweet), it is just that making it at home really makes me realize how much sugar there is already in my diet, and if I can have something with a little less... well, why not! This method is 'home friendly' i.e. these can be made at home with very little effort and equipment, and the recipe comes from my book Sweet As... where I also have the recipe for lavender and orange blossom Turkish Delights. Ingredients 1 l water 300 g sugar 2 tbsp lemon juice 100 g cornflour 1 tbsp frozen raspberries 1 tbsp rose water icing sugar (very little) and cornflour (lots) to dust. In a pot put hal

Home Made Marzipan Sweets

This is another recipe from my book Sweet As , and something that I love to make for Xmas. I would like to say that for marzipan you should get the best almonds around, natural, but here in New Zealand the almonds taste different from the ones in Italy. They are imported, not sure where from most of the time, but they are not top grade almonds. Still, with a few tips, you can make your marzipan taste great even with 'regular' almonds! Buy them natural, not blanched, you need to blanche then yourself or the result will be too dry. To blanch them you need to put them in boiling water for a couple of minutes, and then add cold water and take the skin off, one by one. For this recipe you will need: 200 g almonds 100 g icing sugar 5 apricot kernels. As I was saying before, the almond here have little taste, so I like to collect the stones from apricot and get the almonds out. They are a real pain to crack! In the photo above you can see apricot stones and kernels. The apricot kernel

Silver beet Paneer, a variation of Palak Paneer

The other day I showed you my curry made with borage , ‘invented’ because I have tons of it in the garden! The other green-leaf crop that does well in Auckland is silver beet. My old plants (from last year!) got so tall that I started collecting only the little leaves from the stalks, and they look like spinach. One of my favourite Indian dishes is Palak Paneer (or Panir), spinach with panir cottage cheese, and this variation is made using my silver beet. I washed (many times!) the small silver beet leaves, and then I steamed them and drain them. In a heavy pot I heated 2 tbsp of vegetable oil (I used rice bran oil) and sautéed for 30 seconds: 1/2 tsp ground cumin 1/2 tsp ground coriander 1 tsp turmeric 1/3 tsp ground chili then I added 2 roughly chopped shallots and, after 3 minutes, a good pinch of salt and the cooked silver beet. I cooked everything on low for about 20 minutes (you may need to add just a little water if the silver beet is too dry) and then finely pureed the content

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