I decided to make things a little bit more challenging since my last baking.  For someone who can’t bake, it seems a little silly to do that but what the heck, life is too short 🙂  More than that, my good friend SP bought me a gluten free baking book for turning 38.  Took me a couple of months to gather the ingredients and find the time motivation to do and ta daaaah!!

I made Dark Chocolate Cupcakes for the 12th of May and replaced cocoa powder for carob.  In my opinion, it looked decent, the taste was ok but the texture was plain awful :p  It was like taking a bite into a cake and have it crumble into sand soaking up all the moisture in your mouth.  I did say awful.  My husband aka resident guinea pig of the MacLaughlan household kindly ate a couple and said they were not bad.  If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is 🙂

If you knew me, you’d know I’m not the sort that backs away from a challenge and that’s what it felt like when I looked at the remaining 14 cupcakes in the fridge the next day.  The terribly failed carob cupcakes were sitting in the container daring me to do it all over again, make another batch as awful as they were.  So one night while waiting for a work call to start I had a couple of hours to kill and decided to try the Coconut Heaven Cupcake.

I am happy to report, this time it was slightly better … yes … just slightly.  “Small steps” is my motto.  I’ll get there eventually 🙂  The texture wasn’t so terribly crumbly but still it doesn’t have the cake texture that a normal wheat and dairy filled one would have had but it was ever so slightly better.  The perils of trying to eat better.  People ask me why I do it?  For one, it really does make me feel better.  Ask people who knew me before my vegetarian-bordering-on-vegan days, I would eat anything.  After cleaning up my diet, I do feel like my stomach digests the less processed, less dairy vegetarian-bordering-on-vegan meals more and I do feel better overall for it.  It may all be in my mind, I don’t know and am open to that.

For now, I actually enjoy experimenting with healthier options.  I’m happy to have more tasters if you’re allergic to wheat or diary and wanna try them … I can’t promise they’ll all be good though :p