Vegan Chocolate Coconut Cupcakes

So this is a recipe I adapted from a few trial and errors of vegan recipes that I found online for the Shadow Machine Gala. The original recipes I found were very poorly written with 1 1/4 cups of this and 1/3 cup of that and 3/4 tsp of something else. What’s with all these obscure measurements? It’s like saying something is 38 inches long when you could say 3’ 2” or saying measure out 6 mL of this and 255 ml of that. WHY!!! So I basically developed a fool proof recipe that is really quite easy. It goes something like this.

Note: You can put any kind of icing on these cupcakes such as chocolate ganache or butter cream. I wanted to keep this strictly vegan, so I made it with Chocolate Vegan “Butter Cream” Icing and some toasted coconut shavings. This recipe makes around 36 small cupcakes.

Ingredients:

• 2 cans of Coconut Milk
• 1/2 can of Vegetable oil (or 1 cup)
• 2 tsp Vanilla
• 2 tsp Apple Cider Vinegar
• 1 cup Whole Wheat Flour
• 1 cup All Purpose White Flour
• 1 cup Cake/ Pastry Flour
• 2 tsp Baking Soda
• 1 cup Pure Dark Cocoa (good quality)
• 2 cups White Sugar
• 1 tsp salt

1. Mix wet ingredients. In a medium sized bowl, add coconut milk, vegetable oil (fill up half the can because who wants to do more dishes?), vanilla and apple cider vinegar. Stir.

2. Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl. 1 cup of each kind of flour, baking soda, good quality pure dark cocoa, sugar and salt. Mix it together with a spatula.
 
3. Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and beat with an electric mixer on high until the batter comes out thick but smooth.
 
4. Using an ice cream scoop and a measuring cup to catch the drips, spoon out enough batter to fill 3/4 of the way full in the paper lined muffin/cupcake trays.

5. Put the cupcakes into the oven at 350 degrees F for approximately 20-30 minutes (depends on how hot your oven is and whether or not you have a convection oven.) Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean and when you poke the tops of the cupcakes, the top bounces back.

6. Brush on some coconut infused simple syrup to keep the cupcakes moist. Ice with Vegan “Buttercream” or chocolate ganache or any other topping you would like.
 
Note: Why it’s important to use good quality cocoa. Compare the difference (I ran out and had to use just no name brand cocoa that was in the pantry)