These vegan raspberry ripple cupcakes couldn’t be much simpler to make and are perfect for a children’s party. Now that we’re almost into February, they would also fit the bill for Valentine’s Day.
Each cake has a whole raspberry at its centre, and the raspberry ripple effect in the frosting is achieved using natural hibiscus tea instead of food colouring.
The cake itself is a simple, very light vanilla sponge. If you have a glass door on your oven, you can watch the cake balloon up around the raspberry, eventually enveloping it so that it’s hidden inside like the jam in a jam doughnut.
The icing is a vegan vanilla buttercream with toothpaste stripes of hibiscus tea icing. Hibiscus is acidic and can curdle buttercream, but it works perfectly if you make a thick water icing (or tea icing, I should say) and drizzle this down the inside of the piping bag or tube on top of a layer of vanilla buttercream.
The recipe makes twelve cupcakes like those shown.
Vegan Raspberry Ripple Cupcakes…
Ingredients
- 150 ml soya (or other non-dairy) milk
- 2 tsp cider vinegar
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 65 ml light olive (or other mild tasting) oil
- 100 g caster sugar
- 170 g self-raising flour
- scant 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 12 frozen raspberries
for the icing
- 200 g icing sugar
- 25 g vegan margarine
- a few drops vanilla extract
- strong hibiscus tea (instructions below)
- a little non-dairy milk
Method
- First prepare the hibiscus tea ‘food colouring’. Place a dessert spoonful of hibiscus tea into a cup and add around two tablespoons of boiling water. Leave this to cool. Ideally, leave it overnight to infuse and develop a really intense pink-red colour.
- Set the oven to 180°C/360°F and line a cupcake tin with twelve cases.
- Whisk the vinegar and vanilla into the soya milk and set aside.
- In a large bowl, mix the oil and sugar, then add the milk mixture and whisk together.
- Sift the flour and baking soda into the liquid mixture and stir until it is fairly smooth.
- Using a dessert spoon or tablespoon, fill each of the cases around two-thirds full of the cake mixture.
- Press a frozen raspberry into the centre of each case so that it is half submerged in the mixture.
- Bake for around 18 minutes, until the cakes have risen over the raspberries and are a golden brown colour all over.
- To make the icing (the quantities given will make a bit more than you need, to allow for piping), mix the margarine into 150g of the sugar with a fork. Add the vanilla and a little milk to achieve a soft piping consistency (ie, holding its shape but not stiff).
- In a separate bowl or cup, add a few drops of the hibiscus tea at a time to the remaining icing sugar until you have a thick water icing.
- Once the cakes are completely cool, fill the piping bag with the vanilla buttercream leaving a gap down one side. Spread or drip the hibiscus icing into the gap so that it will produce a stripe when piped.
- This doesn’t have to be done precisely at all – in fact, you could simply swirl the hibiscus icing through the buttercream and apply it with a knife or spoon to good effect!
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