14/08/2019
Love Chef Cynthia, and these look A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!
Can't wait to try them out, they'll def help me get through the study 😊
Let me know if you try them, and what you think x
Chocolate Cupcakes That You Can Eat With No Regret
And I mean it - these are truly guilt-free and finger-licking good chocolate cupcakes that are safe to eat if you are gluten or dairy intolerant or if you are just a chocolate lover as I am.
As always, choosing ingredients and balancing them is the key to the fusion of flavours you want to experience with every single bite. For these cupcakes, I used two types of sweetener - maple syrup and coconut sugar and they mingle very nicely to give a caramel taste. Chocolate cupcakes need to be chocolaty, so I used good-quality cacao powder and a bit of cinnamon for a lovely fragrance.
As for the wet ingredients, I used olive and coconut oil. I found that the combination of these two oils gives a very nice flavour to the cupcakes and I loved it. Since I wanted this recipe to be really velvety and decadent, I used coconut milk. I prefer making coconut milk on my own when I have coconuts lying around in my pantry. If you are opting for an easy option of buying canned coconut milk, check out my blog post on how to choose good-quality coconut milk and make your own one.
And finally, I chose to add some free-range eggs to the recipe, which makes it a problem for all those vegan souls out there. These cupcakes are dairy-free, gluten-free and nut-free but we can make them egg-free and vegan-friendly as well, and that’s the beauty of this recipe. You can use flax as an egg replacement and still enjoy these totally epic cupcakes.
Wait, Are You Saying These Divine Chocolate Cupcakes Don’t Need Any Flour?
I bet you are wondering how all of these ingredients will hold together without any flour. The star of this recipe is believe it or not - quinoa! If you never used quinoa in desserts, now is the time! Besides keeping the batter together, quinoa also adds certain fluffiness and moisture to the cake and just a subtle hint of that nutty, quinoa flavour.
The danger with quinoa is that it needs to be perfectly cooked, otherwise, it will turn mushy. I have a trick for cooking quinoa perfectly every time and I’m eager to share it with you - check out my blog on quinoa. In case you don’t want to use quinoa or you are allergic to it, you can replace it with buckwheat.
INGREDIENTS
2 cups Cooked Quinoa
1 ⅓ cup Coconut Sugar
1 ½ cup Cacao Powder
2 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Cinnamon Powder
¼ tsp Salt
3 Eggs
½ cup Coconut Oil
¼ cup Olive Oil
1 cup Coconut Milk
½ cup Maple Syrup
METHOD
Preheat your oven to 170C / 340F.
Prepare a cupcake tin and 12 cupcake paper cups and set aside.
Add all the ingredients to a food processor and process for about 10 seconds.
Pour ⅓ cup of the batter into each paper cup and bake for about 25 minutes.
When done, allow the cupcakes to cool down on a wire rack.
Pipe my dairy-free, refined sugar-free frosting on top of the cupcakes and serve.
***
Makes: 12 cupcakes
Prep time: 10 mins
Cooking time: 25 mins
Freezer-friendly: No
C, GF, DF, RSF, NF, VEG
The end product is absolutely amazing! Check out the video on my YouTube channel to see how gorgeous the cupcakes look like. They are packed with that chocolate flavour we all love, and you can even feel a subtle crunchiness of quinoa that resembles chocolate chips. Lol.
I usually top these cupcakes with thick and rich guilt-free chocolate icing. And I know what some of you may be thinking - “OMG Cynthia, these cupcakes look amazing but I’m trying to cut down on sugar.”
What you are trying to cut down on is that industrially processed white sugar that does harm to our organs. Maple syrup, coconut sugar, and honey are natural sweeteners with limited human interference and when you serve this to yourself, your organs know exactly what to do with it.
Plus, you know that crash that you experience after eating sweets? That happens when we eat crappy desserts full of processed ingredients. That never happens with wholefood sweets. So, enjoy the ingredients coming from nature, enjoy guilt-free wholefood meals and let me know how these absolutely divine chocolate cupcakes turned out for you.
With love, from my kitchen to yours,
Chef Cynthia Louise xx
