VeganMoFo, post the second

This post is about cupcakes.

I believe in experimentation when it comes to food. You should try things! I love trying things! Sometimes it works out spectacularly: I made an amazing variant of the almond Vanilla Gluten Freedom cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. From reputation alone, the owner of a local bakery here actually wants to talk to me about the recipe. Which is exciting!

However. Sometimes experimenting blows up. But you have to keep going! For SCIENCE!

Is it wrong that the part of me that's wishy-washy about going to grad school is the same part of me that really wants to become the food allergy Alton Brown? I guess that's the food hacker in me. I don't know of anyone else doing the VeganMoFo challenge who does it FOR SCIENCE. Seriously, though, gluten-free baking is mad science if I've ever done it. I have a good friend who is a food scientist; he took a whole class on cereals and the basic point was: gluten traps air, makes things good. So, he was sufficiently impressed that I could bake without it, as well as the fact that I can cook with agar, which he and his housemates mainly recognized as a laboratory preparation.

So. Chocolate millet macadamia cupcakes. Chocovic cocoa powder. Macadamia nut oil. The nutty deliciousness and tenderness of millet flour. They were supposed to be such a brilliant achievement and I was so convinced they would work, I tried to make them twice even after the first batch foamed up out over the tops of my cupcake pans and made a mess of my oven. I was sure that I could substitute millet flour for the quinoa flour in the Chocolate Gluten Freedom cupcakes. The first time I convinced myself I had mismeasured the leavening. But it wasn't that. I took pictures of one of the batches because they looked so weird to me.

Who knows exactly what went wrong. I'm pissed I used up my nice cocoa powder that I only bought a little baggie of cause it was freaking expensive, but other than that, I'm unharmed. I will continue to bake. For science! And also, for me, because cupcakes are damn tasty.