Vegan Mofo

Yay! VeganMoFo is finally here. For the uninitiated, that's a month in which blogs (and now Tweets too) dedicated themselves to posting about vegan food. (More info and to sign up here.)

My first VeganMoFo post will be about cupcakes. Ah, cupcakes, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways... Cupcakes are single-serving size, versatile, and abounding with cuteness. I bring cupcakes to bookclub, to work, and to the gym (yes, the gym) and they make people sooo happy. A colleague today was almost giddy with delight when I offered her a cupcake; my bookclub friends were a little overwhelmed when I provided two kinds of cupcakes (chocolate mint and chocolate orange); and my trainer gobbles up my cupcakes so fast that one of his other clients asked where I got the recipe.

Being vegan, one has two choices: eat whatever ready-made vegan food you can find; or cook. I live in the biggest city in Canada, and I list on two hands the vegan food choices within walking distance of my workplace. Living outside the core of the city means the options near my home are far, far fewer. And when it comes to dessert, vegan treats are as scarce as rednecks doing downward dog. There are exactly two vegan dessert choices near work. So, I cook. And I make cupcakes.

I wasn't really a baker before I went vegan: I didn't really have a sweet tooth. However, going vegan happened to coincide with my year-long weight-loss journey--during which I realized that the salty, crunchy snacks I so loved completely decimate my willpower. If I buy a bag of chips, it disappears before you can say "just one portion." So I tried to eat them less. And then after going vegan and realizing how scarce vegan desserts were, I began to crave them. Human nature is a funny thing: we always want what we can't have!

So I bought Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World, by vegan cookbook author extraordinaire and founder of VeganMoFo, Isa Chandra Moskowitz. It's fantastic. I've made a dozen cupcakes almost every week since I bought it. Since I really shouldn't eat 12 cupcakes before they turn into little iced hockey pucks (ooooooh! cupcake pun--you love it), I save 4 or 5 for myself and give the rest away.

This week I skimmed the cookbook, searching for I recipe that I hadn't made before but for which I had the ingredients. It was a success: I discovered peanut butter cupcakes. My co-workers and my spin instructor were happy to help me eat the dozen!