Eggless Chocolate Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

This was one of those “gotta clear out the cupboards and use everything up!” recipes from a couple months before we moved. There are multiple reasons why this is an awesome recipe — it’s vegan, it’s great for those who can’t eat milk and/or eggs, and it’s easy to make even if you don’t have a very well-stocked cupboard. I don’t know if I buy the story about this recipe being from the Depression era, if only because I’m not sure they’d have had cocoa powder in lean times and all the similar recipes I’ve seen seem to be for chocolate cakes. But maybe they did! I certainly wasn’t around then to verify it.

Based on AR’s Crazy Cake recipe. The cake relies on the chemical reaction between the vinegar and the baking soda creating carbon dioxide to make it rise. There is no vinegar taste in the final product because the vinegar has already reacted and is no longer existent in its original form. Oh, right, and besides being a great science experiment, it’s also a moist, tasty cake in its own right

The ingredients list! 3 cups all-purpose flour. 2 cups white sugar. 1 teaspoon salt. 2 teaspoons baking soda. 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (Ghirardelli is my powder of choice). 3/4 cup vegetable oil (or canola, in my case). 2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar (I might have used a wee bit more, because I just wanted to get rid of the entire bottle). 2 teaspoons vanilla extract. 2 cups cold water.

Now, here’s where I differ dramatically from the recipe. The original recipe says to sift together the dry ingredients in the cake pan, then divide the mixture into three wells and pour the oil, vinegar and vanilla each into a separate well. Then pour the water over it all and stir together. Personally, I don’t see what the point of that really is since the vinegar starts reacting the minute it hits the powder and everything is mixed so soon after. So I decided to just dump it all in the blender in the most convenient manner possible. Here go all the wet ingredients first — oil, vanilla, water and vinegar.

Then blend in the sugar, salt, and baking powder so it mixes thoroughly.

See how thorough and smooth that is?

Then, blend in the cocoa powder.

Finally, add in the flour in small scoops so that it blends evenly. My blender pitcher was pretty darn full by then, but it worked.

I went in with a whisk to give it more aeration and make sure that there were no lumps. The resulting cake batter will be a thick liquid, close to pancake batter consistency. Kinda reminds me of a chocolate milkshake.

As you can see here, I had enough to make a tin of cupcakes plus one layer cake. Pour into lined or greased cake pans. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 30 to 40 minutes, or until tooth pick inserted comes out clean.

Baked cakes! See how well they rose? You can’t tell there’s no egg at all, they’re so fluffy. The cupcakes are done slightly sooner than the layer cake, because of the volumes involved. You can see where I poked the middle of some to check

Finished cupcakes. I used leftover store-bought cream cheese frosting, but I wasn’t particularly trying to be vegan. Remind me to post the recipe for an excellent homemade cream cheese frosting one of these days…