My wonderful readers, I need your help!  I have entered the Earth Balance Cupcake Challenge with some yummy blueberry crumble cupcakes.  The winner is determined by which photo/recipe obtains the most votes, so follow the link here (Earth Balance Cupcake Challenge and choose the tab with ‘Gallery’) and where you see the following photo, click on the link to either ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ about it.  The more votes, the more chances I have of winning.

So let me tell you about these cupcakes.  They are a mixture of the original blueberry muffin recipe on this website (here), mixed with some crumble from my apple crumble recipe (here) and then glazed with a topping I kind of made up as I went along.  They are gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, mostly refined sugar-free (apart from the powdered sugar in the topping) and mostly nut-free (apart from some almond milk).  And they are light and fluffy, with a taste and texture that really surprised me.  I think you can get the recipe from the competition website, but once the competition is over, I’ll be posting it on this website too.

And there’s a story behind why I made these cupcakes – apart from just wanting to bake and enter into the competition.  I originally wanted to make the strawberry basil cupcakes (recipe here) and I had them in the oven, when I realized that they included eggs.  Now the challenge was for a ‘vegan’ cupcake, so eggs were out.  Then I thought I could use my donut recipe (see here) but halfway through realized that i wasn’t going to use any of the Earth Balance products, so I used some of their peanut butter to make a peanut butter banana cupcake.  Unfortunately, they turned out pretty heavy and dense.  So I didn’t want to share that with the rest of the internet world!

And I was going to try using my all-time favorite gluten-free brownie recipe (see here) and substitute ground oats for the egg (just to try it) but was worried they would be very crumbly and fudgey, not really like a cupcake.  Actually I still might try that recipe some time and see how it turns out.  Stay tuned.  

Anyway, as I was flicking through my recipe folder, I came upon the blueberry muffin recipe, which didn’t need eggs and used vegetable oil – which I easily switched to the Earth Balance product.  And to make it look a little more fancy, I included a crumble on top, with a drizzle of a slight hint of lemon in the topping.  Mmmm, they were yummy!

So, I would love it if you would vote for this photo and see if I can win something … Oh, and try the recipe (or any of the other ones that I’ve linked to in this post!) and let me know what you think.

Until next time, enjoy cooking at home!

Sarah