Carrot Cupcakes (with Cream Cheese Icing)

This recipe hasn't remodeled for cup-caking purposes - so, if you wanted to make a  full sized cake, or muffins? all you need to do is a adjust the cooking times and you're good to go!

The recipe is adapted from the one Moll Katzen features in her Moosewood Cookbook I've played around with the quantity of sweetener, the kinds of spices and halved the recipe overall. Finally I topped these little babies off with my delicious cream cheese icing (which I'll feature in another post...) and little icing carrots (I'd meant to use the walnuts I'd omitted from the batter - but I got carried away!)

Aren't they the cutest?!

I took them with me on a picnic where they were very well received. Flavoursome, moist and not too sweet (a trick of that mysterious icing) because they contain both wholemeal flour AND carrots they've got to be good for you, right?

A delicious cross section...

If you've got the stuff with which you can bake in your flat anyway - there's nothing particularly prohibitive about this recipe... if you're not living in a baking friendly flat - try these when you get home!

If you have to give the cream cheese icing a miss (not always a flat friendly ingredient)  they're almost as good on their own - or a simple drizzle of lemon juice and icing sugar would be a suitable substitute.

Taste & Create: Bad Girl's Moosewood Brownies

So... I joined up for Taste & Create in November (for December) totally forgetting (don't ask me how I managed this one) that I was gonna be in India for the entire month. Yeah. I'm cool like that... BUT! And this is the fantastic bit - it turns out that over the Silly Season the girls at Taste & Create give you TWO months to check out your partner's blog - Yay them!!!

"What is Taste & Create?" you're asking... Well, it's the first ever blogging event that I've signed up to and basically what you do is register your name, blog and e-mail and the T&C ladies set you up with a blogging partner. Your mission then, is to read your partner's blog and chose a recipe that you then try out for yourself, blog about and review.

This month I was pared with Min of The Bad Girl's Kitchen who has a HUUUGE long blog full of really interesting looking recipes! But what really caught my eye was her post about Molly Katzen's Moosewood Fudge Brownies and as such, this is the recipe I've chose for my first even T&C event!

The Moosewood cook book is a fantastic vegetarian cookbook that everybody, EVERBODY should own. Says my mother. Who has two copies, I think. And will lend me neither!

Any how, this is how my brownies turned out:



Marbled "fudgy brownies" with Red Food Colouring for  Added ZING!

And this is the recipe I followed which is slightly modified from both Min and Moosewoods version (mine has less butter/sugar)...