preraphaelitepunk.com

(Edit: attempted to get the URL working this time. Ack.)

Though I can sympathize with this person’s desire not to buy a gazillion unusual ingredients to make a single cupcake recipe, I find it somewhat pathetic that they’re having to ask how to unveganize the Fauxstess cupcakes recipe. Also amusing — when you spend any length of time trying to figure out how to veganize omni recipes, you get in the habit of automatically substituting in your head as you’re reading the recipe. Milk = soymilk, or almond milk, or oat milk, or whatever your “milk” du jour is. Egg = egg replacer of your choice — flax eggs, or EnerG, or applesauce, or whizzed tofu, according to preference, recipe, and what you’ve got on hand.

I mean, honestly, how hard is it to see “soy milk powder” and think, “Oh, I don’t have that, and I’m not vegan — I’ll just use a non-soy version”? (I shall not extend this rant to include whether you should be using the non-soy version; we’re purely talking baking substitutions here.) Compared to the mental contortions vegans undergo — well, at least I do — when reading omni cookbooks, I completely fail to see why the reverse process is giving this omni fits. If nothing else, why doesn’t he/she just look on a vegan baking tips site and then reverse the recommendations for substitutions? I mean, it’s not freakin’ rocket science. You’re not going to blow up your kitchen if you screw up the recipe. Worst case scenario is that you might have to clean your oven afterward.

Not having a whole lot of sympathy for the omni baker in this instance, as you can probably tell. I’ve gone through the recipe several times, trying to figure out which ingredient(s) are giving trouble. Sure, the black cocoa powder is somewhat exotic, but Isa says right in the introduction that you can use all regular cocoa if you can’t find it. When I made them, I did have to buy caster sugar, soy milk powder, and shortening, because I don’t normally keep those around, but who doesn’t have vanilla in their cupboard, or flour, or cider vinegar, or canola oil?

Okay, I’ve gone through extreme noncooking phases in years past, during which I could not be relied upon to have even dried oregano in my spice cupboard, let alone something as exotic as vanilla. However, if you’re planning to make cupcakes in a proper fashion (i.e., not from a mix*), I feel it’s hardly extreme for an author to expect you to shell out for flour, chocolate, and maple syrup.

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*When I was in preschool, they once told us that we would be making cookies the next day. I came home absolutely livid afterward, because the grownups had helped us slice up commercial refrigerated cookie dough and called that “making cookies.” To this day, I still feel slightly cheated. That’s heating up a commercial product; making cookies requires mixing bowls and measuring cups and actual ingredients you can pronounce and stuff. I’ll grant that I have, in years distant, heated up the odd batch of commercial cookie dough, and do still occasionally rely on commercial frozen curries and (in moments of desperation) prefab seitan. On rare occasions, I even will buy individual vegan cookies or brownies from WF or Sevananda. Still, I’d never present slicing prefab cookie dough and putting it on sheets as a fun “togetherness” activity for a bunch of preschoolers.