Since 2003, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero have hosted their own public access/podcast cooking show The Post Punk Kitchen from their Brooklyn apartment. In honor of Election Day, I wanted to make something optimistic and a bit political. So, I picked up their latest cookbook, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (2006). I know what you’re thinking. You and your butter-loving skepticism
think vegan desserts are gross. Well, I haven’t had much luck with them myself. But I keep both animals and vegans as friends. For their sake, as well my own curiousity, I bought myself a tub of margarine and started cooking.

Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World contains 75 dairy-free cupcake recipes including Green Tea Cupcakes with Green Tea Glaze and Almond Flowers, Toasted Coconut Cupcakes with Coffee Buttercream Frosting, and S’mores Cupcakes. It also provides helpful information about baking, ingredients and troubleshooting tips for issues such as “My cupcakes sank!” Recipes call for ingredients that may be unusual to non-vegans such as agave nectar (honey-like sugar substitute) and agar agar (seaweed thickener common in Japanese cooking). All ingredients are fairly easy to find in your local organic market. Usually when I’m trying a cookbook or restaurant for the first time, I select the most basic item to put to the test. Not today! I went straight for the Mucho Margarita Cupcakes with Margarita Icing. In a dramatic turn, I did not have any tequila on hand, which was called for in both the cake and icing. But I did have cachaça, the Brazilian sugarcane liquor. With the required lime juice and lime zest, this made for possibly the world’s first Caipirinha Cupcake - cool and tart. Despite some false starts with cooking times and consistency, I came out with some surprisingly good cupcakes.

In their own words, Post Punk Kitchen is about “happiness and fluffy white bunnies and running through the daisy fields barefoot, throwing tofu at passers-by and sprinkling all the earth’s creatures with magical nutritional yeast.” Note to the soy-averse: This book won me over with its affable writing, striking cupcake photographs, sweet design and solid recipes that charmed even a Bourdain-loving omnivore like me into Strawberry Shortcake.

We’re not sure what Post Punk Kitchen’s “Total Cupcake Domination” looks like, but we’re
ready.

The Post Punk Kitchen
Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World

Originally published on Until Monday: Brooklyn