Confetti Candy (aka M&M) Cupcakes with Fudge Frosting (Eggless Recipe)

Baking cupcakes at home has spoiled us rotten, now none of the store bought ones match up and fall short of our quality and taste standards. Recently my sister ordered cupcakes from a local bakery for my niece's birthday to give in her school. My niece didn't even taste the cupcake :-) The cupcake was a little dry and the frosting was too greasy with no flavor.

So moral of the story is to either stop baking at home or stop buying from outside. Today I've homemade cupcakes that I made for my daughter's 15th month birthday. After experimenting with a lot of recipes, I found my go-to recipe for vanilla cupcakes. This basic vegan vanilla cupcakes form the basis for a lot of variations. I've already posted the hazelnut-spice variation and today's confetti candy cupcakes are also a yummy variation to those.

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Eggless Black Forest Cake

Blogging Marathon# 33: Week 3/ Day 3
Theme: Eggless Cakes
Dish: Eggless Black Forest Cake

For the third day of BM# 33, we are celebrating my husband's birthday with an eggless Black Forest Cake. He was travelling on his actual birthday, so we are celebrating it over the weekend. 

Black forest cake brings back fond memories of enjoying time with family and friends back home. This was the usual pastry that we used to order at a bakery next to our school and this was also our favorite cake to order for birthdays and other occasions. Cool cakes, like this Pineapple Cool Cake, are quite famous in India. I remember black forest cake to be cool, moist and juicy -- not too sweet with super light frosting that was simply to die for.

It has been a very long time, infact many many years, that I ate this cake. But I wanted to recreate the cake as I remember it. So first I looked for an eggless chocolate recipe and found this Moist & Soft Chocolate Cake recipe @ Rak's Kitchen. Then I looked for black forest cake recipes for the filling and frosting ideas. After reading through a number of recipes I came up with below recipe.

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Eggless Mango Cake with Mango Cream Frosting

Blogging Marathon# 33: Week 3/ Day 2
Theme: Eggless Cakes
Dish: Eggless Mango Cake with Mango Cream Frosting

Second Cake for this week is a very moist and addictive Eggless Mango Cake. My cousin and her husband have their birthdays within a week of each other in October and we celebrated with this yummy cake at my other cousin's place. I baked the cakes at home, wrapped them up and took them to my cousin's place, then frosted the cake at my cousin's house.

Recipe is adapted from Vaishali's Mango cupcakes recipe. I made the cupcakes once before and for this cake I doubled the recipe to get 2 8" round cakes. This is yet another simple recipe to make, just mix wet & dry ingredients separately then mix them together to make the cake batter.

I actually wanted to make a Mango cool cake, but the cake itself was so moist I didn't want the cake to fall apart, so left it as is. The final cake was a super duper hit with everyone. 

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Eggless Orange-Chocolate Cake with Orange Cream cheese Buttercream frosting

Blogging Marathon# 33: Week 3/ Day 1
Theme: Eggless Cakes
Dish: Eggless Orange-Chocolate Cake with Orange Cream cheese Buttercream frosting

September & October are birthday months in my house. Both my kids are September born and my husband is October born. So when I saw the theme 'Eggless Cakes' for this edition of BM, I knew I have to take it up to try new cakes to celebrate the birthdays.

For my daughter's b'day I made - Pistachio Rosewater cupcakes & Chocolate-Vanilla Marble cupcakes. Both of them were a hit at the party.

For my son's birthday which is exactly 15days after my daughter's I knew I had to make a chocolate cake. I asked my son if he had any preference and he said he wanted a orange flavored chocolate cake. His latest favorite show is Pokemon and can talk about the characters for hours. So I made him a Orange-Chocolate Cake with Orange cream cheese-butter cream frosting and I tried to add one of the Pokemon characters in the frosting.

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Halloween Whoopie Pies (Eggless Recipe)

For this month's Home Baker's Challenge, our host of the month Nalini Suresh @ Nalini's Kitchen chose 5 spooky & yummy Halloween treats. When I saw the challenge the beginning of the month I felt like I should make all of them. But of course time slipped through my hands and in the end I was scrambling to find time to make at least 1 of the treats. After much deliberation, I ended up making these Halloween Whoopie Pies.

I've never made whoopie pies and this challenge gave me a chance to make these cakey cookies. I didn't have orange nonpareil, so used yellow glittering sugar which doesn't make the whoopie pies look too Halloween(y). In any case whoopie pies turned out great and we all loved them. 

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Eggless Chocolate Cake with Jam for a Celebration

May is a month of celebration in my real home and also in my virtual home. It happens to be my birthday month (yup.. I'm a tough Taurean :-) ) and of course there's Mother's day celebrations. It is also my blog anniversary month -- Cook's Hideout has completed 7 years of blogging. 

Blogging years seem to me like dog years. There are a quite a few blogs that were active at one time, but are no longer virtually alive. I feel like a veteran among many new and upcoming food bloggers. I have to thank my family for their support and patience without whom I wouldn't have been blogging for so long. I was telling my mom the other day that I cook and eat well even when I'm alone because of my blog. 

Big thanks to Valli, the master mind behind Blogging marathon and all my fellow marathoners for their infectious enthusiasm.

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Eggless Vanilla Cake for Wilton Course 1-Class 2

Blogging Marathon# 27: Week 4/ Day 5
Theme: Miscellaneous - Wilton Decorating Course 1 - Class 2
Dish - Eggless Vanilla Cake with Wilton Butter-cream frosting

Wilton decorating course is a once a week 2 hour class for a total of 4 classes. For the second class, we were required to bring a 8" cake and 2 recipes of butter-cream frosting ready to use in the class. This class focused on torting (slicing a cake into layers) and leveling a cake, frosting and then transferring a design on to it. Again we were asked to buy quite a few tools to do this. Since I'm planning to make more cakes, I bought everything they had in the list, like this cake leveler, turntable and cake lifter. Fancy stuff, eh?? Good thing was I had a 25% off store coupon which saved me quite a bit.  

What I learnt was to always use thin consistency icing for frosting the cake and it's not as easy as it looks (at least that's what I think). We also learnt some piping techniques, like curving lines, zigzags and filling in.

I made an eggless vanilla cake and I think this will be my go-to vanilla going forward. I saw the recipe on Sharmi's blog and than Suma made it too, so I went ahead and made it for the class. It is a fluffy and moist cake that stands up to the frosting. Double the ingredients and make 2 cakes if taking to the decorating class.
Just as a side note, it was my choosing to make eggless bakes for the course, you can make any of your favorite recipe or store-bought mix. Also Wilton's butter-cream recipe has meringue powder in it, which is nothing but pasteurized powdered egg whites, so if you want to make this completely egg-free, then you might want to not use it in the recipe.

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