Resolution Kitchen: Blue Moon Orange Cupcakes

These may have been the tastiest cupcakes I've ever created. They're light, fluffy, and packed with flavor. Who knew that beer went so well with cupcakes? I saw these on Pinterest, another social media site that I'm completely addicted to. Between blogging, pinning, and facebooking I've been spending way too much time online. I even started using my laptop again, something I haven't really used since graduating college. Like everything else on this blog, these cupcakes are vegan. Even the beer is vegan.

I started Saturday night to prepare for yesterday's Super Bowl. We had a lot of cooking to do the day of, so anything that could be done the night before was. Once again I turned to allrecipes.com for a vegan cupcake recipe. They had a great one using coconut oil and apple cider vinegar instead of butter and eggs. I added some zest from a naval orange, which added a sweet kick to the cupcakes. Zest from the same orange was used to flavor the icing, the recipe for which can be found at the bottom of this page.

Beer doesn't always bake well, so before the cupcakes were iced, I poked holes in the top of them with a toothpick and brushed them with Blue Moon using a pastry brush. You couldn't really taste the beer (the orange flavor dominated), so if you're a fan of Blue Moon I suggest not only brushing the cupcakes with a lot of beer, but also using it in the icing. To thin the icing I usually use water, but next time I'll add a Tbsp of beer. This batch made 9 cupcakes, and they're gone already. Logan and I just split the last one.. and I just realized I gave my 15 month old beer. Oops. I'll keep an eye out for clumsy, wild behavior. Oh wait, he's always like that.

Blue Moon Orange Cupcakes

Makes 9 cupcakes

1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
1 1/2 Tsp. apple cider vinegar
3/4 cups almond milk
1 cup flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 tsp. orange zest

Preheat the oven to 350º.
Melt the coconut oil. I do this by putting the oil in a small glass dish, and placing it in a saucepan full of water over the stove. Just make sure the water doesn't come above the top of the glass dish. See the picture below.
Pour the vinegar in a 2 cup measuring cup. Add almond milk up to the 3/4 cup mark. Let stand for 5 minutes, or until curdled.
Mix the flour, sugar, powder, soda and salt in a large bowl.
Add the coconut oil and vanilla to the almond milk mixture.
Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl with the flour mixture, and mix well.
Fold in the orange zest.
Pour into a greased muffin tin (makes 9 muffins).
Bake for 15 minutes.
Once cooled, poke holes in the top of the cakes with a toothpick and brush with beer.
Make the frosting. Mix 1 tsp of orange zest into the icing, and thin with a Tbsp of beer (instead of water).
Frost cupcakes, and top with orange wedges.

Coconut oil melting on the stove

Everything ready to be mixed

Another Super Bowl idea I saw on Pinterest. I usually wait until spring to eat strawberries, there's nothing like a Long Island strawberry! These were so cute though I couldn't resist. We did our shopping at Pathmark, which doesn't carry the vegan Endangered Species chocolate. I did find that Ghirardelli 72% cacao from their all natural Intense Dark line doesn't contain milk fat or any other animal product. The "laces" were added with Wilton's cookie icing that I had leftover from decorating Christmas cookies.