Happy New Year!
Lately I’ve been playing around with and making a few vegan recipes. I haven’t grown my hair long (those that know me will know that ship has well and truly sailed) or developed an inexplicable fondness for mung beans. I also won’t be taking up veganism on a full time basis anytime soon, but my son and daughter-in-law have, which has pushed me into trying a few recipes, and I’m also interested in some of the replacements and substitutions that can be made for common ingredients.
Date and Nut loaf, often referred to simply as nut loaf, is a recipe bound up in various traditions such as the shape, the appearance and how it should be eaten. I really love it, but you don’t see them too often these days. That could be because it’s quite a while since I have had school-age children, and an even longer time since I had any involvement with a church, because nut loaves are the stuff that cake stalls are made of.
If you google the term ‘banana popularity’ you will get a heap of results informing you that bananas are the most popular fruit in the country of the website’s origin, including the UK, USA and here in Australia (putting aside for a moment that bananas are not technically a fruit, and a lot of other fascinating detail). As well as their massive popularity, bananas are a relatively delicate tropical fruit with a short shelf life, meaning that recipes aimed at using up over-ripe bananas are commonplace, and like bananas themselves the most popular of these recipes is banana cake.
Cupcakes always look deceptively simple, and like cake-making in general they can be very quick to make. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, mix them together, pour into a tin and stick it in the oven. But as usual with such things the devil is in the detail. I wouldn’t say I’m a regular baker by any means, preferring instead to make savoury, and when I first tried making cupcakes I was regularly disappointed, primarily because they always came out rather dry compared to the moist little delicacies I thought they should be. So I turned my attention to meeting that specification and these pineapple cupcakes I think fit the bill, but getting pineapple in was not only in the pursuit of moistness but was driven by a different experience.
