These gluten free coconut lime cupcakes are an absolute delight – made with THE fluffiest coconut + lime cupcake cake (complete with fresh lime zest, juice, and toasted coconut), and dreamy coconut + lime buttercream (with all of the above plus of course butter, salt – to bring out the sweetness and round out the flavor, and icing sugar). This is the first recipe I’ve gotten to think through, draft, bake, decorate, film, AND shoot (food photography wise) in over 10 months, and it feels really nice to get back to things that allow me to be creative, in charge of every design and flavor decision, and use our new…
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Gluten Free Filled Strawberry Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Buttercream
New recipe alert! Gluten free filled strawberry cupcakes with my favorite cream cheese frosting! It’s been a minute since I posted a new recipe here – it’s been a wild (and VERY positive) term here at Oxford and I haven’t been doing much recipe development! The past 8 weeks have been an absolutely whirl wind: falling in love, getting Covid (and isolating with the person I fell in love with), baking lots of stuff but mostly things I’d baked before (“comfort bakes”), working more on my PhD here at Oxford as I prepare for future field work, exploring more of the UK countryside with housemates, and now at the end…
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Gluten Free Red White & Blue Cupcakes
Tis the season for ALL of the red, white, and blue items you own to make their annual appearance, including these brand new gluten free red white and blue CUPCAKES! Thank goodness my friend Natalia asked if I could make a 4th of July treat this year because I realized I had absolutely no “patriotic” bakes on here – although I do consider lots of my bakes to embody the values and goodness of this nation. For example, these Black Lives Matter shortbread cookies, this rainbow pride cake, this trans pride cake, this BLM Swiss roll, these Juneteenth strawberry hibiscus cupcakes, or this black sesame cake commemorating Day of Remembrance…
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Gluten Free Spumoni Cupcakes
Alright, who else has had spumoni ice cream before? I have this magical, hazy memory of getting it once (maybe I got it every time we went – who knows at this point) at Antonio’s – one of the three restaurants in “downtown” Eagle Point where we grew up. Eagle Point was a town of 5,000 when we moved there in 1998, though as a 5 year old the sense that it was the town the size of a pinhead didn’t really register (and Kendra was 2 so she definitely didn’t have a clue at the time). The downtown consisted of one street. Not like a city street that stretches…
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Gluten Free Orange Creamsicle Cupcakes
I don’t know why I never buy orange creamsicles – they’re FABULOUS. If you, too, have fond memories of these perfectly-orangey, perfectly vanilly popsicles, these are the cupcakes for you. For the life of me, I can’t remember the first time I had one of those beacons of cold creamy orange bars, but I do know that on every school field trip I’d hope that the treat at the end of the day wouldn’t be those twin cherry/strawberry/lime ice cream bars but a glorious orange creamsicle. There’s something about the smooth center and bright, peachy orange outside. So, here I am in my late 20s, continuing on the theme of…
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Gluten Free Black and White Cupcakes
Racism is baked into the bones of America. Even after perceived progress due to the courage, tirelessness, and perseverance of so many, including Dr. King, racism persists in the very systems that this country is built on. In all the ugliness of 2020, thousands marched for the same injustices, the same changes that Dr. King wrote and spoke about over five decades ago. Because racism never left; it’s been twisted and reformed to fit into what we think are socially acceptable channels today. The saying, “they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds” applies to racism and racists as much as it applies to those who are…
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Gluten Free Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Buttercream
Pumpkin desserts are one of those American things that seem to boggle people in other countries who haven’t grown up eating them every October, November, and December. I’ve probably told this story before on here but when my dad was in his early 20s and traveling through Europe, staying with Servas (an awesome international network of hosts + travelers!) families and picking up odd jobs to fund his next step, he stayed with a family in Sweden who had (not surprisingly) never tried an American pumpkin pie. So, being the guest that loves cultural exchange (as both of my parents are), my dad went searching through markets and grocery stores…
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Gluten Free Hi Hat Cupcakes
Halloween was always one of my favorite holidays. My sister and I were VERY into dress up (especially Renaissance and other time-period costumes) growing up – we even had a dress up closet that consisted of giant bins of fanciful dresses and capes and scarves and wigs and suspenders with which to enrobe ourselves for various make believe games and mock-plays. Stepping into the outerwear of some other character not only allowed us to feed our wild imaginations, but also to inspect various aspects of ourselves. We would heighten our silliness or breathe life into our anger or ambition and create characters flooded with those magnified bits of our own…
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Gluten Free Spiced Pear Cupcakes with Vanilla Pear Tea
Tis the season for spices in EVERYTHING, and we’re not mad about it. There’s something so cozy and comforting about the ethereal mix of nutmeg+cinnamon+ginger+allspice+cloves, and any combination of any two of them really, in baked goods, warm fall drinks, and in roasts or stuffing. In this case, we’ve dumped heaping teaspoons of them into these gluten free spiced pear cupcakes with a mapley/spiced buttercream. Pear is one of those delicate, nearly-not-there flavors that are usually best highlighted in slender slices on their own, especially when they’re perfectly just ripe and cut like butter. But we really wanted to figure out a way of putting them in cake form, or…
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Gluten Free Irish Cream Cupcakes
I’m a tea drinker – any coffee and my heart thinks it’s part of a horse race and my brain bounces off ALL of the mental walls faster than tonight’s debate dissolved into absolute carnivalistic absurdity. So the coffee in the photo shoot for these cupcakes was, I’m sure, absolutely terrible, made from instant coffee granules (GREAT for baking) and promptly tossed out after the winning shots were captured. But! I do love a good coffee-infuse/flavored/enrobed baked good. Or coffee ice cream – I’ll take that any day before 6pm. These gorgeously indulgent cupcakes have not only a luxurious chocolate cupcake (with Irish Cream Liqueur), but they’re filled with –…
