Pumpkin Chai Latte Cupcakes with Nutmeg Cardamom Icing (Gluten-Free, Soy-Free, Vegan)

No, I didn't throw paleo out the window! This is one of the recipes in my baking cookbook and I've been meaning to share it with you here on the blog because there's actually a typo in the cookbook. And it's my fault! I looked over that recipe 500,037 times and still somehow didn't catch that typo!! Fingers crossed that's the only typo in the book!

But I really want you to have this recipe. It's probably one of my very favorites in the entire book not only because it's gluten-free, but because it contains pumpkin and chai spices, it's soy-free AND it's also vegan. Yep. No eggs or dairy in that lovely cake.

This is the recipe I keep turning too when people ask me to make them cupcakes for a friend or a neighbor, for a birthday or just because. They are spicy and sweet and they make nearly all tummies happy! They are moist and decadent and have a really lovely crumb. And that homemade icing, it's TO DIE FOR.

I actually made the cake this week for a fundraiser for a family in our community. They are going through some really tough times with medical issues and when a neighbor asked if I could donate a cake, I gladly jumped at the chance. Even if it's a treat that I really shouldn't be eating due to sugar or grains, it's still a joy to make them for other people.

So here's the deal with the recipe in cookbook, this recipe is listed on page: 187 in the cakes and cupcakes chapter as Chai Latte Cupcakes with Nutmeg Cardamom Icing. What needs to be corrected is that the original recipe in the book ONLY makes about 9-10 cupcakes and NOT 24. It's a small batch recipe. It can EASILY be doubled, tripled, even quadrupled! For the cake above I actually tripled the recipe and ended up with a 2 layer cake and about 8 cupcakes. How I managed to look at that recipe hundreds of times and miss that mistake, I will never know... but trust me, it won't make 24 cupcakes! (Unless maybe they are minis! lol)

Either way, it's a really delicious cake or cupcake. I'd love to come up with a grain-free version of this recipe without eggs (since there are SO many folks who follow paleo, but who also need to follow an autoimmune protocol or have egg sensitivities), but until then I hope you can enjoy this version! And while you're at it, double the recipe and share them with a friend!

Pumpkin Chai Latte Cupcakes with Nutmeg Cardamom Icing
Created by Carrie Forbes
Reprinted with permission from "The Everything Gluten-Free Baking Cookbook" 
Free of gluten, dairy, soy, eggs
Printer-friendly Recipe

Ingredients | Serves 9

Cupcakes
1 cup brown rice flour or sorghum flour
¹⁄³ cup arrowroot starch or tapioca starch
½ teaspoon xanthan gum
¼ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon sea salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
½ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¹⁄8 teaspoon ground white pepper
1 cup almond milk, warmed to 110°F
4 black tea bags
¼ cup light-tasting olive oil or canola oil
½ cup unsweetened applesauce or plain pumpkin purée (I highly recommend the pumpkin) 
¾ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Frosting
1 cup Spectrum Palm Shortening (Or Crisco™ if you're cool with that or butter if you can tolerate dairy!)
4 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
3–5 tablespoons ice water

Instructions: 

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line muffin tins with 9-10 paper liners and spritz with olive oil or nonstick cooking spray.
2. In a large bowl whisk together the brown rice flour or sorghum flour, arrowroot starch or tapioca starch, xanthan gum, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, cloves, and pepper. Set dry ingredients aside.
3. In a small bowl or glass measuring cup, heat almond milk in the microwave to 110°F. Add the tea bags and allow to steep for 10 minutes. Remove tea bags.
4. In a medium bowl mix together the tea-steeped milk, oil, applesauce, sugar, and vanilla. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until you have a thick cake batter.
5. Fill the lined muffin tins 3/4 full of batter.
6. Bake for 25–30 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the middle of a cupcake comes out clean and the tops are golden-brown. Cool for 5 minutes in the pan and then turn out cupcakes onto wire racks to cool completely.
7. Make the frosting: In a medium bowl, cut shortening into confectioners’ sugar with a pastry blender. Stir in spices. (If you prefer a less-spicy frosting, use only ½ teaspoon of each.) Mixture will be crumbly. Thin the frosting with ice water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until you get the consistency you desire to frost the cupcakes.
8. Store any remaining cupcakes in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

Carrie's Notes:

• To increase the pumpkin flavor in the cake even more, you can easily replace up to 1/3 cup of the almond milk with additional pumpkin puree. 
• Any type of non-dairy milk OR regular milk will work.
• Coconut palm sugar will work perfectly in place of the sugar, you can also decrease the sugar to 1/2 cup without compromising the texture of the cake. 
• For chai tea, simply whisk together the spics called for in this cake and add 1/2 teaspoon of the mixture to your regular hot tea with a splash of almond milk or regular milk. Coconut milk would also be lovely. 

Can you help bring Bomber home?

Ms. Tia, just hanging out with her kiddos! 

My super awesome, eco-hippy, all-natural, dreadlock wearin' friend Tia Colleen needs your help. Let me give you a little bit of a back story Ms. Tia Colleen and her family...

Tia's husband Christopher is in the military, which makes them a military family who must travel whenever they are given orders. Tia's husband was given orders to be stationed in Hawaii about a year and a half ago, so they all went along. It was quite a journey with four beautiful babies in tow, along with with their sweet kitty Bomber.

Well, somewhere along the way Bomber decided she wasn't quite ready to go to Hawaii right at that moment so she took off on her own.

As you can imagine for any family who loses a pet it's tough. It's even more tough when you lose a pet when you're midway across the country headed to Hawaii and you have no way to figure out where your pet went and if they will be okay... and if you will ever see them again.



Tia thought she's never see Bomber again. Her babies were heartbroken over the loss of Bomber and it made the whole move even more stressful than it already was.

Now here we are, nearly a year and a half later and Tia gets this phone call from the Boise Humane Society. THEY FOUND BOMBER! This little kitty has miraculously survived on her own for over a year in the area of Boise, Idaho. (I'm embarrassed to say I had to look up what state Boise was in.. I was thinking Montana... for shame Carrie!) Thankfully another military family at Mountain Home AFB (yes, also in Idaho... now you know!), is fostering Bomber until Tia can raise enough money to fly her to Hawaii.

You wouldn't think something like this would be a big expense, but for a single-income military family, it's a lot as they will have to pay for airfare, vet bills, quarantine procedures, etc...

And I realize this sounds like a crazy request in some ways, especially to those who don't have pets... but it's really important. Tia and her family have been so far from their friends and relatives and they in some ways are having a hard time calling Hawaii home. Tia has such a strong bond with Bomber that she couldn't bring herself to get another cat once they got to Hawaii, she knew that no other animal would replace the relationship she and her children had with this special cat.

So can you can head on over to http://www.gofundme.com/5crji0 and help Tia out? We need to get Bomber safely to her, so Tia and her family can FINALLY feel like they are truly home again. 

Lessons in cooking with Melissa Joulwan

Beef carnitas with homemade guacamole and the occasional handful of
organic corn tortillas. 

(I KNOW, I KNOW... these pictures are terrible!! I could NOT make this pretty! I'm sorry... I promise it tasted much better than this looks!) 

Since going gluten-free in 2007 I eat very differently at most restaurants. At the time (late 2007), one dish I discovered to be gluten-free at our local Mexican restaurant was pork carnitas. They were savory, rich chunks of pork that had been gently cooked down with warm spices until they were super tender. When the liquids cook out of the dish, the pork then sizzles in it's own fat until its crispy and delicious on the edges. Down home Mexican comfort food.

This was my staple Mexican dish when we visited that restaurant. I would crave those pork carnitas, served with warmed corn tortillas and refried beans and sometimes a guacamole salad.

At some point last summer we visited our local Mexican restaurant again (we hadn't been in a while) and I ordered my usual pork carnitas... except... they were NOT my usual pork carnitas. Apparently they had a new chef who had changed all the recipes and now the carnitas were deep fried (and most likely cross-contaminated in a shared fryer) and they didn't seem fresh. This recipe also didn't have the rich, deep flavors that I was used too. In all honesty it seemed like they reheated leftover fried pork carnitas... and they were NOT yummy. 

I was hoping it was a fluke, so we visited the restaurant again a few weeks later. Nope. Same deep-fried pork carnitas that seemed like last week's leftovers. They were not the succulent, slow cooked morsels of delicious pork simmered in Mexican seasonings that I had enjoyed for years and I was really disappointed.

So I went without them and we didn't eat much Mexican for a while... I was bummed. When I wanted comfort food, I really wanted those old pork carnitas.

And then, a few weeks ago I got my copy of Well Fed 2 by Melissa Joulwan, the queen of paleo awesomeness. And as I was flipping through her glorious cookbook, I remembered something... HER FIRST awesome cookbook... It had a recipe for citrus pork carnitas! I had to try them. (For those who don't have the cookbook, Melissa graciously has the recipe posted on her site.)

I'd never made a recipe where you purposely allow the liquids to simmer out of the pot (key word purposefully!)... as Melissa shared in her recipe directions:

"While it's cooking, it will look like uninspired soup! As the water evaporates, the powerful citrus juice tenderizes the meat... (then) watch as the meat magically fries and caramelizes in the fat and fruit juice. It is a thing of beauty..."

(For those of you who would like to write cookbooks, I encourage you to buy Melissa's cookbooks, not only for the amazing recipes, but to see awesome examples of how truly intuitive and helpful instructions should be written!)

And Melissa's instructions were key. The pork did exactly as she described and by the end of the cooking process those juicy pieces of succulent meat had soaked in all the amazing flavors of the broth and spices. The flavors that developed in those chunks of pork were amazing, I remember standing there just picking the meat out of the pot and swooning at each bite. THESE were the pork carnitas I had been missing. (Thank you Melissa!)

So in all this talk about pork carnitas, where does that top picture of beef carnitas fit in? It fits in on a rainy fall afternoon when finances are tight, but you just happened to have a beef roast thawing in the fridge. And I was kinda tired of your "plainjane" beef, carrots, potatoes, and onions "pot roast." It's good, don't get me wrong... but it's not what I wanted.

This particular beef roast I had thawing was marbled with a good bit of fat and while I was thinking about dinner soon after lunch (oh stop, you do it too!), I started to wonder if you could use the same technique with a beef roast as you could with pork. Then I found this recipe online, which sounded similar to Melissa's recipe for pork, and I decided to try it, using some of the suggestions from the commenters. Such as adding a bit of cumin and maybe some cayenne for some additional heat and flavor... and because I loved Melissa's version, I added lime juice as well. A little extra citrus never hurt anything.

And it worked. It worked amazingly well and because I cut the beef into about 1" pieces it was nearly done in an hour, which was very helpful for a weeknight meal. I think what I love most about this recipe is not only how tasty it is, but its lesson in appearances... that "uninspired soup" when you started cooking turns into a gorgeous pan of sizzling, bold-flavored cubes of meat that literally make you smile when you taste them. What seemed like the most simple and mundane of cooking techniques produced incredibly good results.

Have you had any kitchen epiphanies lately?

The guac? It was just two overly ripe mashed avocados with chopped cherry tomatoes, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and lime juice...

The tortilla chips? Rare and organic and work occasionally in my hue of paleo.

Seasons of change

Life has changed so much for me in the past several years. I've spent the past two years writing books nearly non-stop... and honestly I'm tired! For a little while I felt like I was pretty much done with cooking. I was "cooked' out, burned out, baked out. And "written" out as well...

Over the past few years we've been there with my Dad as he's survived a severe heart attack, followed by three months in the hospital and rehab, then this summer he was blessed with a "brand new" heart via a transplant... those times brought so much reflection, there was joy with tension, hope with timidity, love with smiles followed sometimes by tears... and through it all deep, deep appreciation for doctors and nurses, for people who choose to give their organs, for family and friends who have ALWAYS been there for us along the way. And of course for my Dad.

My cat Mitten (who was so much more than just a "cat") passed away this year and that brought deep grief and despair and yet, hope. We lost my amazing grandmother "Nan" along with my cousin Annie. We lost Michael's aunt, we had other family members going through major life changes that were painful and hard. And all we could do was simply watch, pray, be there... and yet feel like we couldn't really help, which feels so "helpless" in itself..

So my thoughts and my heart have been so incredibly far away from food these past few months. Which probably isn't the most effective way to be a successful cookbook author... but it was important to me to learn where my priorities needed to be and how to ride peacefully with each ebb and flow of life.

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this blog, with this little space on the vast internet that I've shared my story and my recipes since August 2007.

I haven't been creating a lot of recipes as of late, I've just been trying to get dinner on the table. Yes, it's gluten-free... but trust me, it isn't exciting. Yes, it's mostly paleo... but you wouldn't need a cookbook to make it.

Our meals have consisted of a protein + veggies + sometimes a healthy starch, like sweet potatoes or butternut squash or even white rice or potatoes on occasion. Truly nothing exciting... and honestly it's been a good place. I'm not looking for excitement at dinner these days.

I've found my thoughts veering towards simple, real food. I've been thinking about the way my grandmother made meals for us, the way my great-grandma always wanted to feed us. The way my Dad  has always expressed so much of his love for his family through food. I've been fascinated with food history and about the ways we need to honor the local foods of our region and our family traditions. I've always loved these things, but they've become much more important.

So as life has changed, my plans for this blog have changed. I'm not going anywhere... but I'm still not exactly sure about the content I plan to share in the future. I want to focus more on simple meals, on real foods, on family traditions, on bringing food close to home, etc... but how to do that, I'm not quite sure yet. I want to write more.

At it's core, this blog has been a way for me to write, and write often. And probably much more than cooking, I love to write. I love to explore thoughts and ideas through words and this means I may lose some readers along the way. I hope not, but I'm afraid that may happen.

I also want to share more about other aspects of our lives. Our faith, our journey, possibly poetry or short stories, essays, etc... and I want to hear from you. I want to share your stories. Your food stories, your life stories, your faith stories... I'd love to know what inspires you, what moves you, what makes you sing and dance, and cry, or simply pause in awe..

Oh and cats... maybe we'll share more cat pictures... those seem to be pretty popular around the internet these days :-P

Gluten-Free, Grain-Free Blueberry Coffee Cake

Over the weekend we attended one of our yearly family reunions. Even in this day and age of constantly new technology, our families still get together for several different reunions every year. And as with any family holiday or event... you really go for the food. Yes?

I've been "paleo-ish" for about 7-8 weeks now, so I really wanted to make a few dishes that I could definitely eat and that would hopefully appeal to others as well. While we really need some fresh groceries, I did have a fairly well stocked pantry so I made a "paleo" blueberry coffee cake - the FIRST baked good I've made in the past few months and I also was able to find enough ingredients in the fridge to create an "anti-pasta" platter!

I have to admit I really enjoyed creating both dishes. There's just something lovely about creating foods from scratch and I really enjoyed baking the coffee cake, something I haven't done in ages.

The anti-pasta platter was fun to put together as well. It was incredibly easy and turned out very pretty by the time I was finished. My friend Pamela over at "Aseafish Out of Water" often creates dishes like this, so I was thinking of her when I put together that platter of meats, cheese, and olives.

The coffee cake is adapted from one I found on "Paleo on Main." I changed a few ingredients and added blueberries, simply because I had a bunch in the freezer. I LOVED how this coffee cake turned out. I don't know if it's because I haven't had baked goods in so long, or because I've reduced my sugar intake so much, but it tasted incredibly sweet, even though it was only sweetened with a small amount of honey and the natural sugars from the blueberries. Definitely a win!

Gluten-Free, Grain-Free Blueberry Coffee Cake
adapted by Carrie Forbes from a recipe shared by: Paleo on Main
free of gluten, grains, dairy, white sugar, and soy
printer-friendly recipe

Cake Batter Ingredients:
2 cups blanched almond flour
1/2 cup arrowroot starch
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup full-fat coconut milk
2 large eggs
1/4 cup honey or maple syrup
1 tablespoons pure vanilla extract
1 cup frozen or fresh blueberries

Streusel Topping Ingredients:
2-3 tablespoons coconut palm sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup crushed pecans or walnuts
3 tablespoons butter or coconut oil, optional for dotting on top

Directions:
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease an 8x8 baking dish with coconut oil or butter and set aside. In a large bowl whisk together almond flour, arrowroot starch, baking soda, sea salt, and ground cinnamon. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add in the coconut milk, eggs, honey, and vanilla extract. Stir to combine into a thick batter. Fold in the blueberries. Pour into the greased baking dishes. Spread evenly throughout the pan. In a small bowl whisk together the coconut palm sugar, cinnamon, and pecans. Sprinkle over the casserole and dot the top of the casserole with butter or coconut oil if desired. Bake for 35-45 minutes until a toothpick or knife inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean the crust is golden brown. Allow to cook  REST/COOL for 15-20 minutes before slicing and serving.