It’s been a few weeks since my last ‘cooking with kids’ post, but rest assured we’ve been doing lots in the kitchen.  I just haven’t had the time to post either the blog, or the photos!

Abby is still really keen on making cupcakes.  Basically turning most of my cake recipes into cupcakes.  And obviously making them gluten and dairy-free for little old me …!  So this week, she wanted to do a pineapple mango cupcake that she had seen on … you guessed it … Cupcake Wars.  But since we didn’t have most of the ingredients to do it exactly like on the show, we adapted it.  And had lots of fun doing it.

We took the lemon polenta cake (recipe here) that we had recently adapted with orange instead of lemons and added buttercream frosting (see here) because we knew that worked well as cupcakes.  This time, instead of the lemon zest in the cakes, we chopped up some pineapple and added a bit more juice, and a little bit more cornmeal/polenta to make sure we had the right consistency.  

The frosting was meant to be a mango whipped cream with a decoration of a white chocolate fondant rocket.  I thought that was slightly out of our range of decorating skills and expensive to try to make gluten and dairy-free.  So we improvised with a white chocolate buttercream frosting (using some sugar-free white chocolate syrup that we’ve found here), and then cutting some dried mango pieces into suns.

So, you may ask, why are these called ‘let there be light’ cupcakes?  Well, Abby is really keen on our food truck dream and she wants to help make cupcakes for it.  And all of her cupcakes she wants to relate to a verse, or verses in the Bible.  Hence, the mango suns (instead of the white chocolate rocket) and this was tagged as when God created the sun and the moon (Genesis 1:14).  Hence – ‘let there be light’ cupcakes.

There is a postscript to this story.  These cupcakes we made for my ladies Bible Study group that meets at my house every week.  One of the ladies is also gluten and dairy intolerant, and so are some of her kids.  She took two of the leftover cupcakes (yes, we didn’t eat all of them in one night!) home for her kids and her son loved his so much that he wanted it for his birthday cake.  So Abby and I offered to make the cake and the frosting, and Jenn took on the task of decorating it.

Awesome job isn’t it?  Haven’t yet heard how it tasted, or how it was received by the rest of the family, but I was impressed by how this kind of snowballed.

And … I just found out that another of my friends is using the lemon polenta cake recipe and making it to bring to dessert for a lunch.  Amazing … and I feel very humble that a small little website like mine, and a small little recipe, could gain so much enthusiasm and joy.  And that’s what I do this for – to make other people happy.

Thanks for reading.  Remember, if you like what you read, or see on this website, you can subscribe to get new recipes delivered to your inbox as soon as they are published.  I’ve got a number of them that I’m going to be posting in the next few weeks, so you have been warned.

And tell your friends and family … and be joyful in the Light!

Until next week, enjoy cooking at home … with kids!

Sarah