Recipe: Easy-peasy chili chocolate vegan sourdough cupcakes!

Content note: this post discusses food. And pussies.

If you just want the recipe without having to wade through this obnoxiously long story section where it’s difficult to find anything you want, it’s available to patrons on my Patreon!

I know I tend to hold controversial opinions, but an opinion of mine which draws most gasps is that I don’t like cake. There, I said it. I don’t like cake. And the reason I don’t tend to like cake is because I can’t fucking stand eggs, and I find that when cake is made with eggs, it tends to have a kind of… egginess. Meanwhile, vegan cake is better, due to the non-egginess, but often, it has a bit of a heavy texture.

Now, though, I’ve made a cake I actually like. It’s not eggy, because it contains no eggs, and yet it manages to have the softness and lightness of a non-vegan cake! Let me introduce you to my cunt sourdough cupcakes. Or cunnycakes, I suppose.

I mentioned in an earlier post about making sourdough pancakes that the chemical reaction between sourdough starter and bicarbonate of soda is quite remarkable, and creates a texture similar to having to fuck about with eggs to put air into them. These cupcakes use this same reaction to create lift, with a little bit of help from self-raising flour (1 and 1/4 cups).

I’m a huge fan of chili, coffee and chocolate, so this formed the basis of my cunnycakes. I started off by boiling up 5/6 of a cup of water, and adding it to just under half a cup of cocoa powder, a tablespoon of instant coffee and half a teaspoon of chipotle chili flakes. I adore smokey chili flavours, and these gave the cakes a little kick at the end. I also added a tablespoon of espresso vodka, which is probably strictly optional, but it was kind of vanilla-ish and straight from the freezer, which cooled the mixture down a little quicker. You’ll want to wait till it’s tepid once you’ve mixed it all to smooth.

Usually, I’m really annoyed by recipes which call for mixing dry ingredients with wet, because they often call for tedious folding to keep the air in. I’m just too heavy-handed to be gingerly and gently folding my flour into the wet ingredients, so I cannot be fucking arsed with that bullshit. I’m pleased to report that this recipe requires precisely zero folding, and all the mixing can be done quite quickly. Also, it’s quick as fuck: it actually took longer for the cocoa-coffee-chili mixture too cool than it did to mix everything together and bake it in the oven! The baking is literally ten minutes at 180C in a fan oven!

For the dry ingredients, I used the self-raising flour and 3/4 cup of sugar. I went with caster sugar, as I had some in the back of my cupboard, I have no idea how it’d turn out with other forms of sugar. And, of course, for raising, I used half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda.

Bicarbonate of soda is alkaline, so needs something acidic to react with. Sourdough starter is an acid, so half a cup of that goes in. You all know all about my sourdough starter, which includes a bit of vaginal yeast. Obviously, that bit is optional. Sourdough starter has a pH of about 4-4.5, which is roughly similar to a human vagina anyway–our minges have a pH of around 3.5-4.5! However, I wouldn’t recommend just using pussy juice instead of the sourdough starter, as you’d have to do some sort of arcane calculation to figure out how to change the flour ratio. For extra acidity, I also added a tablespoon of lemon juice.

So, basically, I mixed my dry ingredients with the sourdough starter, lemon juice, chili-chocolate-coffee mixture and half a cup of coconut oil. This was the first time I’d ever cooked with coconut oil, and because it was a hot day, it was ideal. To turn it from a solid, which it is when it was cool, to a liquid, I just left it on my balcony for about five minutes. What wasn’t completely liquid at room temperature quickly melted when mixed with the tepid chili-chocolate-coffee mixture.

That all got mixed together with a whisk, until it formed a smooth batter, which basically resembled… cake batter. Like, normal cake batter. Unfortunately, it doesn’t taste anywhere near as good, because uncooked sourdough starter tastes pretty funky. If licking the bowl is your favourite thing about baking, you’re going to be disappointed, but your disappointment will soon be alleviated by some tasty fucking cakes.

I had no idea how many cakes this recipe would produce. I expected maybe about twelve, but as I started spooning the mixture into cake cases, it turned out to be much more. Much, much more. You can get about 24 cakes out of this recipe.

At this juncture, I still had no idea what to expect. Would they rise at all? Would they resemble cakes? Would they rise too much and take over my oven, claiming it as The Autonomous Republic Of Utterly Failed Cake Baking? I suppose, what I expected was that kind of close-textured thing you often end up getting with vegan baking.

I was wrong. Midway through the bake, I needed to turn the tray around, because my oven is much hotter at the back than it is at the front (even though it’s supposed to be a fan oven). “Fuck me,” I said, out loud. “I’ve made cakes.”

And when they came out of the oven, they were definitely cakes.

More like conventional, non-vegan cakes. More like the sort of thing you usually make with eggs!

And reader, they were really fucking good. They had a coconutty taste from the coconut oil, which tempered that pleasant bitterness of coffee and cocoa. At the end, there’s a very light chili kick. I took a bunch of cakes round to a Scarlet Ladies meetup, and they were proclaimed delicious.

Using the sourdough-bicarb reaction, I expected to produce something edible, possibly even bordering on passable. Instead, I managed some really good, yummy cakes, which I’ll definitely be making again. I hope you have a go at cooking these tasty girls yourself. You have everything you need to replicate this recipe in this post, but if you want it in an easier format, it’s in basic recipe form on my Patreon.

Happy baking!

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