Sweet potato cupcakes (vegan) - Fruits and veggies monday

If I was a sweet potato, I would be utterly offended by those out there who ignorantly fail to see the difference between me and the common old white one. For one, sweet potatoes, when sliced, can be brilliantly orange, yellow or even purple and therefore extremely pleasing the eye. In addition, they are tantalising, rich in sweetness and there is plenty of fluffy cloud texture to be had. The bonus being, that they are just oozing with nourishing goodness, and are a lot more resilient in our digestive tract, taking much longer to be broken down into glucose than the white version.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a white potato hater, I just love sweet potatoes (a lot more).

I would probably class them as being one of, if not my only, favourite vegetable (okay, so some bias there!), and that was even before I realised how versatile they were. Back in the day, sticking one in the oven and dipping it in mayonnaise or topping it with salt and butter was good enough. But now my kitchen life has lead me to a different path, away from the mayo and marg, to desserts.

One of my most loved- probably because they don’t require too much effort- are simple sponge cakes. They can be frozen, eaten plain, topped with frosting, consumed with tea, made into trifle or a pudding of some sort- the list is endless.

The sweet potato intervention means that all of this stuff becomes a million times more moist and can keep for longer before compromising texture for a more dry one. Vegetable cakes are great in that sense and they also don’t actually taste like the vegetable! Although, with sweet potato being up there on my top 5 list, I wouldn’t mind! For that reason, I piled in the potato to bring out it’s flare, combined with sweet spices and the combination couldn’t be any better for me.
I ate most of them plain, but pushed out the boat on a few by topping them with lemon and toffee frostings.

Serving size:
Makes 14 cupcakes

Ingredients for cake:
• 200g plain flour
• 2tsp baking powder
• 1tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 200g caster sugar
• 200ml rapeseed oil
• 200ml soya milk
• 2 sweet potatoes mashed
• 1tbsp cinnamon
• 1tsp nutmeg

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C.
2. Mix the dry ingredients together and the wet ingredients (except the sweet potato) together.
3. Now combine the dry mixture and the wet mixture together using a whisk.
4. Fold in the sweet potato mash.
5. Transfer to cupcake cases and bake for 20 minutes.
6. Allow to cool before serving or topping.

I think they would also taste great with some maple syrup and bacon (the non-vegan versionof course), but I’ve not tried that yet, so if you get to it first, let me know how it goes!