These vegan blueberry ripple cupcakes are really a variation on a recipe for Raspberry Ripple Cupcakes I posted a few months ago, with two crucial differences: blueberries (!) and butterfly blue tea to colour the icing instead of hibiscus tea.
Butterfly blue tea, which is used as a cocktail ingredient as well as a drink in its own right, is a brilliant shade of blue and is ideal as a natural food colouring. You can buy it from specialist tea suppliers or online. It doesn’t really have any taste but, even in such tiny amounts, there must surely be some benefit in those extra anthocynanins!
Blueberries are, of course, bursting with healthy properties. This recipe uses frozen blueberries, which are more economical. There’s some evidence that frozen berries are even more nutritious than fresh ones, but I suspect that has something to do with how long ‘fresh’ ones have been stored or in transit and isn’t based on a comparison between frozen and freshly picked fruit.
The blueberries are placed in the cupcakes individually, which sounds fiddly but it only takes a couple of minutes and it ensures an even distribution throughout the batch. It also results in clear inky splotches in the finished cakes, rather than the overall purplish sponge you get when you mix frozen blueberries into cake batter.
I’m not a fan of excessive frosting so these are decorated with a modest swirl. They really are sweet enough this way.
Blueberry Ripple Cupcakes…
Ingredients
- 150 ml oat (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
- 72 frozen blueberries (around 100 g)
for the icing
- 200 g icing sugar
- 25 g vegan margarine
- a few drops vanilla extract
- strong butterfly blue tea (instructions below)
- a little non-dairy milk
Method
- First prepare the butterfy blue tea food colouring. Place one teabag or a dessert spoonful of the flowers into a cup and add around two tablespoons of boiling water. Leave this to cool. Ideally, leave it for a few hours to infuse and develop a really intense blue colour.
- Set the oven to 180°C/360°F and line a cupcake tin with twelve cases (for the pictured cakes I used muffin cases, but the finished cakes will fill standard cupcake cases).
- Whisk the vinegar and vanilla into the oat milk followed by the oil and sugar.
- Sift the flour and baking soda into a large bowl.
- Gradually pour in the liquid mixture, stirring as you go. Stir until it is fairly smooth, but it doesn’t need to be perfect.
- Using a dessert spoon or tablespoon, fill each of the cases around one quarter full of the cake mixture.
- Press three frozen blueberries lightly into each case, before adding another spoonful of the cake mixture. Top each with another three blueberries and press them very lightly into the mixture.
- Bake for around 18 minutes, until the cakes have risen well and are a rich golden 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 blue 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 blue tea 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 blue tea icing through the buttercream.
For a children’s party, you could bake a batch each of the blueberry and raspberry version: Raspberry Ripple Cupcakes
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