The Bread Project - If you call it a muffin it doesn't count as a cupcake

Last Christmas, Daniel gave me a vegan cupcake cookbook, by the same ladies who wrote Vegan with a Vengeance. The pictures inside are gorgeous, and I've been wanting to try my hand at some of them for a while, either in cupcake form or all mushed together into a big old cake.

However, while in school, any kind of organizational system that I'd ever developed has fallen to ruin, and my bookshelves are no exception. So the vegan cupcake cookbook had disappeared. Until this morning when I decided I wanted to bake some kind of breakfast pastry. I flipped through several options in some of my cookbooks, but without molasses for kasha muffins (my molasses had fallen victim to an ant problem earlier this year) and no lemons for a loaf of lemon bread, I was becoming discouraged, until suddenly, out of nowhere the VC cookbook (that's vegan cupcake, mind you, not Viet Cong), reemerged miraculously. I thought to myself, "Well, why not?" Without frosting, cupcakes become muffins.

I went for the vanilla cupcake recipe because it didn't involve any vegan baking oddities like egg substitutes or arrowroot. But I wanted to jazz it up a little and make it more breakfasty. So the vegan blueberry lime poppyseed muffin was born.

Here's the recipe
Adapted from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero

Vegan Lime Blueberry Poppyseed Muffins
Makes 12 Muffins

Ingredients
-1 cup soy milk
-1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
-1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
-2 tablespoons cornstarch
-1/2 teaspoon salt
-3/4 teaspoon baking powder
-1/2 teaspoon baking soda
-1/3 cup canola oil
-3/4 cup granulated sugar
-2 teaspoons vanilla extract
-the juice of a lime
-a few handfulls of blueberries (frozen or fresh)
-some poppyseeds (to your liking)

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, grease two muffin tins
2. Whisk the soy milk and vinegar together and set aside to curdle a bit (mine didn't really)
3. Beat the soy milk mixture, oil, sugar, vanilla, and lime juice together in a large bowl. Sift in the flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and mix all together until no lumps remain.
4. Stir in the blueberries and poppyseeds.
5. Fill muffin tins about 2/3 of the way and bake for 20-22 minutes (mine took about 25, but my oven tends to be slow)
6. Transfer to a cooling rack.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with these little guys. They're very shiny because of the soy milk, I think. And a little purple in color because of the blueberries, I know. They're also a little stubby and dense, but in a charming way. It's a good vanilla flavor, and a very quick and easy recipe. Next time, I'll go wild and call it a cupcake.