The Pomegranate Cupcakes That Were Never To Be

While at work today, I came up with an idea of making pomegranate cupcakes. In my head, they looked something like the above; a dark, rich pomegranate cake topped with a light vanilla frosting. As you will come to find out, this is not what I ended up with. The end product from this kitchen adventure turned out to be this:



Yeah, I know. It looks like dog dookie in a really awesome vintage souffle bowl. But it's actually my version of bread pudding: vegan chocolate bread pudding. Now, how did I go from a light and fruity cupcake to a rich, heavy, chocolate dessert? Well, I will tell you.

My first mistake was to think that the wonderful color of pomegranate juice would translate in the cupcake batter. When I mixed it in, instead of turning the batter into this awesome magenta color like I thought it would, it turned kind of gray-ish brown. I'm still not even sure why/how that happened.

The second mistake I made was to think I could substitute all the liquid in my cupcake recipe that's usually almond milk for Pom juice. Well, I'm not a chemist, but I now know that something in the almond milk has a binding effect on the batter, and without it, it turns out looking like this:



Now, being the eternal optimist that I am, I thought that even if they weren't that pretty, that maybe if they tasted good enough I could convince you, the reader, that this was the perfect dessert to make, so long as you weren't giving them out to dinner guests and feeling your self-esteem crumble along with the cupcakes in their hands. But when I tasted them, there was nothing special about them. Not a terrible taste by any means, but it was plain Jane.



Either the crumbling or the plain taste alone I could have put up with, but since the two of them were holding hands and sticking their tongues out at me together, I had to come up with something totally different. I lost no time.



I crumbled all the cupcakes into my souffle bowl (not that hard of a task!), but then was stuck on what I should add to the crumbled mess. That is, I was stuck until I thought of what makes EVERYTHING better....chocolate! So I quickly got to work making a liquidy chocolate sauce that would firm up in the oven just enough.



This called for some egg replacer, which as an aside, I want to know when the heck this packaging was designed, 1974? I bought this not that long ago, but every time I look at it, I am transported to the '70s. Which is not a bad thing.



I ended up with this delicious, molten, sticky, chocolatey, warm, gooey mess. Not the prettiest thing in the world, but a seriously good comfort food! Recipe below.

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
3/4 tsp salt
1 1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup vegan butter
1 cup sugar
4 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup Pom juice

1 cup almond milk
1/2 cup vegan butter
5 oz. semi-sweet chocolate
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
3 tsp egg replacer
2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a small bowl, sift together flour, salt, and baking soda.

In a medium bowl, combine sugar, vegan butter, apple cider vinegar, and vanilla extract until smooth. Add the flour mixture and combine until well incorporated. Stir in the Pom juice until the batter looks somewhat uniform.

Pour into a greased muffin tin and bake for about 19 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of each cupcake comes out clean.

Let cool in the tin, then, using a spoon, scoop out and put into a casserole dish and crumble finely with the spoon. Set aside.

Meanwhile, in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan, combine almond milk, vegan butter, chocolate and apple cider vinegar. Heat over low heat, stirring often to prevent the chocolate from burning. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk together 3 tsp of egg replacer with 4 Tbsp of water.

Once the chocolate and almond milk mixture has melted completely and is combined, stir in the egg replacer mixture and vanilla extract. Whisk well. You will start to feel it gelling fairly soon after you add this.

Pour over crumbled cupcakes and stir to cover all the crumbles with the chocolate mixture. Bake at 350 for about 15 minutes. Let cool and enjoy immediately.