Cupcakes are by far my favorite dessert, I just don’t bake them very often because they’re so unhealthy. I’ve been craving something sweet lately though, and when I saw these chocolate filled vanilla cupcakes on Manifest Vegan‘s blog I wanted them pretty fiercely. I had all the ingredients on hand, so I whipped them up this afternoon. They were unbelievably easy and it was fun stuffing icing down in the cupcake. They were delicious!

cupcakes

For dinner I decided to have something healthy to make me feel better about eating such sugary desserts, so I made the soft poppy-seed polenta from Veganomicon topped with Vegan Brunch‘s smokey shiitakes. Those shiitakes are one of the best recipes out of that book and I use them with a large variety of meals because they’re so quick to make, plus I’ll make anything that uses liquid smoke as an ingredient. The addition of poppy seeds to the polenta made it pretty.

Soft polenta w/ smokey shiitakes

Now, the best soup I’ve ever had is the chickpea noodle soup from Veganomicon. The only time I really eat soup is when I’m craving it, which I did a couple weeks ago. I looked through a bunch of my cookbooks for a suitable meal before settling on this recipe, mainly because it had miso in it, which is my new love. While it was cooking my apartment smelled divine, and it was so good I ended up eating half of the recipe by myself in one sitting. I’ve never had any kind of soup that even came close to being so delicious. This recipe by itself would be reason enough to buy a copy of this fab cookbook!

****Also, my camera is broken, so pictures are now being taken with my cell phone, hence the terrible quality. If anyone knows how to fix a “lens error” (i.e., my lens won’t open), please please let me know!