swim until you can't see land.: CUPCAKE POST! CUPCAKE POST! and it's vegan.

i want to start this off by saying "there's a GIRL in ze castle!"

because i'm watching beauty and the beast on VHS. and i've just kind of always wanted to start a blog like that.

there's a GIRL in ze castle!

but this post is about baking sort of not almost but not quite vegan cupcakes.

the recipe is vegan. but we didn't have non-dairy milk. so they weren't entirely vegan.

so the twins arrive at one, after i've tried to desperately clean the kitchen while snarfing an entire box of kraft mac n cheese at the same time. and we bring my computer downstairs and get on pinterest to find the recipe for floating chocolate vegan cupcakes. and then hannah tells me that indiana has a state pie.

that's right kids, indiana has a state pie. and it's a sugar cream pie.

we gotta make it.

yummmm.

so we go to kroger to find nutmeg and half and half. we used to have half and half, but my mom just made homemade ice cream last weekend. my dad, the almighty chemistry teacher, has a lab about "colloidal suspensions" which means making ice cream in a bag in big bad chemistry terms.

my mom twenty-fied that recipe. and instead of shaking a bag, she churned it. we're that nerdy in my house.

but we were out of half and half.

we go to the new kroger. hannah and emma have never been there before, and i'm just excited that i'm not awkwardly grocery shopping by myself. hannah is a price matching queen.

"hey, em, what's the unit price on this nutmeg?"

like a boss.

after much giggling and falling over each other, we make it back to my house, and we decide that we better start baking the pie because it has to bake a lot longer than the cupcakes.

so we dig in. on goes the lion king broadway soundtrack.

hannah and emma aren't shy about much. after i showed them where stuff was, they were wholly in command of the kitchen. they managed to find the vinegar when i couldn't.

me: i know we have vinegar somewhere!
emma: you have to. your mom bakes and hoards cake mixes.
hannah: and your dad is a chemist.
me: yeup. must have vinegar.

for the record, hannah and emma don't use mixes. mixes are shameful. these vegan cupcakes didn't involve any type of mix at all.

mixes are my thing. i can't cook to save my life. and i can bake with a mix. if i work really hard.

i'm curdling milk. hannah is mixing brown sugar and apple sauce. and emma is mixing up cocoa powder and flour. and i'm taking pictures and saying, "hang on, i need to take these for my blog."

it really sounds that pathetic in real life too.

while this is going on, we're also making a pie. i'm trying to open the pie crust, which is a big fail. we stick it on a baking sheet, and all of a sudden emma has appeared with the all of the ingredients in a bowl like she was just born with them in her hand, and then hannah is pouring it into the crust. and then we're just supposed to slice up some butter and drop it on the top.

we have a white liquid pie with butter floating on top of it. weird. real weird. and hannah puts on our ove gloves and the pie is underway.

hannah. whisking. or stirring.
or something.

then emma and hannah are combining everything for the vegan cupcakes and they hand me a spatula. stir stir stir! whisk whisk whisk!

sing CAAAAN YOU FEEEEL THE LOOOOOVE TONIIIIIIGHT.

i'm not going to lie. this vegan cupcake batter looks awful. it's like... this super awkward brown color that may or may not be the color of poop. and it's gloopy.

really really gloopy.

uh, yeup. doesn't that look appetizing?

i'm nervous about this. but i stick in a finger and it's absolutely DELICIOUS.

seriously guys, vegan cupcakes. that's where it's at.

we decide to make mini cupcakes, because those are cute, and i have a mini cupcake pan and some mini cupcake liners. hannah is spraying them with cooking spray over the sink, and she's afraid that the cooking spray is going to blow them away.

how sweet. cupcake liners blowing away in a mist of oil.

HANNAH AND EMMA HAVE CUPCAKE SCOOPERS! LIKE ME!

by now, emma has taken the pie out of the oven and she's lining it with aluminum foil so that the tips don't burn. i didn't even know that you could do that with a pie.

and now we're listening to the inception soundtrack and sticking cupcakes in the oven.

we're listening to the inception soundtrack.

do you understand the epicness of this? our cupcakes are now the most epic things to have ever been concocted in my kitchen. because of inception. BECAUSE OF HANS ZIMMER.

eventually we start to get hungry. so what do we do?

emma was REAL stoked about that
homemade ice cream.

we grab the homemade ice cream from the freezer. so now we're sitting in my kitchen, eating homemade ice cream, listening to inception, and baking vegan cupcakes.

about halfway through our baking extravaganza, my brother came home for the weekend!

YAAAAY!

he took a decent look around the kitchen, and then he went upstairs and shut his door.

just as well. we had started a sock hop in the kitchen. inception was over and we had started it on disney songs.

"let's get together, yeah yeah yeah!"

perfect sock hop music.

next was the frosting. we weren't having any of that canned stuff. emma was boiling flour and milk into... paste. yep, paste. it was really nasty looking. then she whipped some stuff and some things for a long time in my mixer and then suddenly we had the airiest, most whipped, and most delicious frosting i had ever eaten.

our 100 calorie vegan cupcakes were no longer 100 calories.

life is too short to watch what you eat.

so our mini cupcakes were adorable. they were fluffy and moist and delicious.

but our second batch of cupcakes were... wet. flat. weird.

we had turned off the oven without knowing it.

so of course, because there's no eggs, this cupcake batter is fine. so we lick the cupcakes out of their wrappers.

CUPCAKE GOOP YUM!

om nom nom. cupcake goop all over your face, dancing to disney music, whipping frosting.

we've been baking for almost three hours at this point.

we have a crap load of frosting and only two batches of cupcakes.

oops.

while emma is still perfecting the frosting, hannah and i start in on a mix.

shameful. i know.

i channeled my bruce banner and i whisked the cake batter by myself. no mixer for me! RAWR! HULK! BAKE!

then we were watching sandra lee videos while the pie cooled in the garage fridge and the rest of the cupcakes baked. sandra lee, disney music, way too much laughing and giggling, zumba moves in the kitchen, and much dish washing.

sad cupcakes. :(

our last batch of vegan cupcakes kind of caved in on themselves. they were super bright and puffy, and as soon as we took them out of the oven, they suddenly just... sagged! it was the saddest thing!

we filled those suckers with frosting.

yum yum yum FROSTING.

fatty frosting. even yummier.

the cupcakes from the mix were yummy too. and nice and puffy. and the twins had this really awesome frosting knife, so hannah did a fantastic job of frosting them while emma and i sat at the table and talked about the gorgeous nature of mark ruffalo.

more yum, my friends.

the twins came over at one. they left at six thirty.

KEEP ON BAKING TILL THE WORLD ENDS.

did i just make a britney spears reference?

good lord. i've eaten too much vegan cupcake batter.

so here are some pictures. and a video that we took.