Gluten, dairy, nut free chocolate cupcakes

If it looks like a rich, dark, naughty, jump-on-the-treadmill-to-work-off-the-guilt chocolate cupcake then it is right? Wrong! Not when the mad scientist aka JJ from 84th and 3rd has been in the kitchen. Oh no this is not just any old mouthwatering chocolate cupcake. This is special.

You could eat this cupcake for breakfast. You could probably eat it for dinner and you would have still had a couple of serves of vegetables even if you ate nothing else. ‘What’ you say. Have you gone mad Claire? I have not thank you very much (although I think my sister who has spent a few days with me this week – more than she has in a while – might disagree).

Where was I? Oh yes vegetable cake, sorry, I mean chocolate cake. Gluten, dairy, nut free chocolate cupcakes (refined sugar free too so Paleo) to be specific.

Look at that fudgey icing piled so high. Would you believe that cauliflower lurks within the folds? See told you, healthy. What if I told you it also has avocado? You get where I’m going with this don’t you… it’s so healthy you could make a bowl of it and eat it for dinner. Not saying I did that (I might have had it for afternoon tea instead).

The rich cupcake gets it’s moisture from grated pumpkin. I think JJ just found a way to get kids to eat their vegetables while thinking they’re eating chocolate cake. Now I will give a little word of warning. If you are used to eating the full sugar-butter-flour-deliciously-rich version of chocolate cake then this does not taste quite like that. It is amazingly luscious and scrumptious but you can tell it’s not a regular chocolate cake.

If you served it to someone who doesn’t have chocolate cake every day I would say they would gobble it up, lick their fingers and ask if they could pretty please have another.

I’m not going to put the recipe here because the only thing I changed from JJ’s recipe was making it in cupcake form instead of one big cake so here is the icing recipe and here is the cake recipe.

My only tip would be to taste the icing and adjust the sweetness. Depending on the avocado you get they can be a bit bitter. I had to add a bit of extra maple syrup to my icing. You could also serve the icing in cups with berries as a mousse for dessert. Delicious! Enjoy!

What about you? Have you ever made a chocolate cake with vegetables in it?

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