Today is my 3rd blogiversary, so I’m celebrating with vegan chocolate cupcakes!
My hell-month of March is almost over. Now all I want are vegan chocolate cupcakes with a fluffy dollop of vanilla buttercream to kick back and relax. Oh wait. I need to write two papers and do one more final assignment before I graduate. And then do that thing where I enter real life with student loan payments and whatnot. WHAT IS LIFE EVEN. But I’m weirdly excited.
Today I’m celebrating my 3rd blogiversary for Je suis alimentageuse. I can’t believe it’s been three years since this little corner of the Internet started. So many things have changed since ol’ March 2013 rolled by.
- I went vegan.
- JSA went from getting maybe 300 views per day to getting over 3000 views per day (according to Jetpack anyway).
- I switched to iPhone.
- New camera! (Canon Rebel XSi to 60D)
- My photography significantly improved (although it was improving before I got the new camera too)
- I found my voice.
I think the thing that really made me find my voice was understanding what I wanted to do with my blog. Before I was aimlessly experimenting with various recipes, ranging from super simple cookies to elaborate macarons with fancy swiss meringue buttercream. I pushed myself to try more complicated recipes and to take pictures of these fancy desserts, even though I don’t actually have that much of a sweet tooth. You guys said you wanted more anecdotes, so I give you more anecdotes. Two years of vegetarianism and 6 months of veganism later, JSA has become a huge collection of recipes, snippets of food facts and pockets of my life.
And I don’t think I would have been driven to improve JSA or continue if it weren’t for you guys. Thank you so much for reading, for commenting, visiting, pinning… everything. The support of my fellow bloggers and readers is overwhelmingly touching. Thank you for following my food adventures as I stumble through life trying to figure out who I am.
In April I’ll be finishing my MA in Translation Studies, and even though I love academia and I love learning about translation theory, it’s only through JSA that I’ve found out who I am and what I want to be. The past year has been a giant ball of procrastination via photography, recipe development, and website design. Procrastinating by doing those things is really a sign, isn’t it? Why do something I like, when I could do something I absolutely love and am actually good at?
I’m okay at a lot of things like languages, networking, and writing.
But food?
This is finally the one thing that I know I can do.
So thank you for joining me. Thank you for helping me realize what I love to do.
Thank you.
Now have some vegan chocolate cupcakes.
Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream
Ingredients
For the cupcakes
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 2 Ener-G eggs (1 tbsp egg replacer + 1/4 cup water)
- 1/2 tsp vinegar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 cup rice milk (or other milk alternative)
- 1/4 cup dutch processed cocoa powder
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking powder
For the buttercream
- 1/4 cup vegan butter
- 1/4 cup vegetable shortening
- 1 1/2 cups icing sugar
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 cup rice milk (or other milk alternative)
Instructions
To make the cupcakes:
- Preheat oven to 350F. Whisk together vegetable oil, egg replacements, vinegar, and vanilla until incorporated. Sift in baking powder, dutch-processed cocoa powder, flour, and salt. Stir in rice milk until all ingredients are fully incorporated. Divide among 12 cupcake liners filling about 3/4 full.
- Bake for 16-18 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean when you poke it in the middle. Remove and let cool on a wire rack for about 5 minutes, then remove from pan to cool completely on wire rack.
For the icing
- Whip vegan butter, vegetable shortening, vanilla extract, and rice milk until light and fluffy. Add in icing sugar and whip until you have a very fluffy icing (it should clump inside the whisk after about 5 minutes of whipping using a mixer). Transfer to a piping bag and frost cooled cupcakes as desired.
Brianne @ Cupcakes & Kale Chips says
I LOVE the falling sprinkles photos!! Congrats on 3 years! So happy to have “met” you and so excited to actually meet you!
Lisa Le says
Hahah thanks Brianne =) I’m excited to meet you too!! LESS THAN TWO MONTHS =O ><
Holly Waterfall says
Congratulations on 3 years!! And on finding your voice! Both amazing accomplishments. SO happy to have met you on this journey. I’d like to “Cheers” with cupcakes to another year of amazingly awesome vegan treats and wisdom :)
Brianna Hobbs says
Congrats on another year of blogging! I’m with Brianne, LOVE the falling sprinkle photo.
I’m very glad to have met you on my own blogging journey.
Lisa Le says
Thank you Brianna! It’s been great meeting you too ^_^ Are you coming to BHF?
Brianna Hobbs says
I wish! Maybe next year. I’m actually still trying to get into Blogher, I can reapply in a few months and hopefully they’ll like me better then. :)
Katie @ Produce on Parade says
Happy Blogiversary! That’s awesome how much you’ve accomplished in the past year. You’ll have a Veganniversary before long! :) Mine happen to be on the same day, so…I totally should of planned that out better, ya? Translation studies sounds totally cool, by the way! Do you have a focus or speciality within the Major?
Lisa Le says
Haha that’s even better! Celebrating two things at once =) I originally was doing research on translator training/pedagogy/didactics and I did a couple papers on it, but then I was also really interested in feminist theory and social media so I branched off and did some research in those fields in relation to translation. I’m basically all over the place. I was going to do a thesis but I opted for the course-based MA instead so that I could research all the different fields I was interested in.
carmen says
Hello there, I used this recipe, the cake wasn’t bad but I found it needed quite a lot of water and your recipe has no sweetner or sugar :( Had to add by myself and still didn’t find it as sweet to the proportions of the recipe, so could you please tell me how much sugar you’d place inside the cupcakes? I skipped the frosting
Lisa Le says
Ohhh my god I totally forgot to add sugar. Thank you for commenting to tell me!! It’s 3/4 cup sugar I’m so sorry about that. I definitely did not add any water, but the sugar would help make the batter lighter for sure.
Kaitlyn says
Great photos – especially the sprinkles falling. Cupcakes are the best way to celebrate. Thanks for sharing this vegan recipe!
Lisa Le says
Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment :) I haven’t shot kind of creative or peppy photos like this in a while, maybe I should!