Well, it’s Monday again. How is it that the weekends go by so quickly? I hope your weekend was a splendid one and your Monday is off to a fine start. 🙂

Remember these little cupcakes I shared the other day?

Well, I thought today might be a good day to share the recipe with you, so you can pop them in the oven after school or work and cheer yourself out of the Monday blues!

These cupcakes are another incredible creation by Chocolate Covered Katie – no surprise there, as I honestly can’t get enough of her healthified, vegan desserts. The cakes are sweet and airy, yet moist and decadent, not needing any frosting and the added calories. The fact that the recipe made only 9 cupcakes was a good thing, too, as we didn’t need them sitting around beckoning us to eat them (even though I think I ate all but two by myself).

Their vanilla flavor was just perfect for a dessert, and the pop of sprinkles that I added made them look as sweet as they tasted. Because they get their flavoring from the extract used, they could be incredibly versatile – I have a mind to use lemon next time!

Skinny Confetti Cupcakes (E, N, D)
very slightly adapted from Chocolate Covered Katie’s recipe

Ingredients
– 1 cup all-purpose flour
– 1 tsp. baking powder
– 1/2 tsp. baking soda
– 1/2 tsp. salt
– 2 tsp. powdered egg replacer
– 6 tbsp. granulated sugar
– 1 tbsp. pure vanilla extract
– 1 cup plain yogurt (I used dairy yogurt because that was all we had; to keep it vegan, use soy!)
– 1/4 cup vanilla rice milk
– 3 tbsp. coconut oil or canola oil
– 1/4 cup multicolored sprinkles

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350*F, and line a muffin tin with papers.
2. In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and egg replacer.
3. In a large bowl, combine sugar, vanilla extract, yogurt, milk, and coconut oil. Stir very well, as the coconut oil needs to be evenly dispersed in the batter.
4. Add half of the dry mixture to the wet, and combine before adding the other half. Do this in batches so you do not overmix the batter!
5. At the last minute, pour in the sprinkles. You want to do this at the very end so the colors don’t bleed too much!
6. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in a cupcake comes out clean.
7. Let the cupcakes sit in the tin for at least 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack. They look very oily at this point; the reason you want to let them sit is to allow the coconut oil to solidify again to room temperature. Once you allow them to finish cooling, they will not be so oily.
8. Enjoy!

Notes:
– As I mentioned before, I think it would be delicious to try swapping out the vanilla extract for something like lemon – or raspberry or orange! Yum!
– You definitely could top these with a vanilla frosting (I think my dad would have preferred them that way) but I thought they were a perfect little treat plain.
– Instead of multicolored sprinkles, you could use themed ones for Valentine’s Day, spring, Fourth of July, Halloween, or Christmas! 🙂

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So, I bet you’re wondering about that “little MFM thought”? Well, the MFM stands for Meat Free Monday, and I thought that, it being Monday (obviously) I’d share something with you that I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m thinking that during the month of February I might try a pescetarian diet.

I really don’t have a reason as to why I’m trying this other than just because I want to challenge myself. As I’ve mentioned before, I already eat most meals of my week without meat – especially when I’m cooking for just myself – but I wanted to try a pescetarian diet to see if I really could do it. Sure, some of my reasoning includes the fact that buying meat is expensive on a college student’s budget, and not eating meat is better for the animals, the environment, and my health. But overall, it’s nothing heroic or poetic – it’s just a little challenge I thought I’d try. 🙂

So, that being said, why I am still including fish in my diet? Well, that’s mostly because I am hypoglycemic, and if I don’t have enough protein in my system for a few hours, I crash and get verrrry cranky. If I haven’t been eating enough protein over a few days, I get very easily fatigued and just feel awful. Which is not fun for me or anyone around me. 😉 Having said that, I don’t want to sound insensitive or ignorant; I know that there are many other ways vegetarians get protein. But I also know that eggs and nuts are large parts of some peoples’ diets, and for me, those are impossibilities because of my allergies. So, my plan is to get enough daily protein by eating Greek yogurt, tofu, homemade Clif or protein bars, beans, whole wheat pasta, bread, and other products, brown rice, quinoa, cheeses, and finally, fish.

I still haven’t decided whether or not to catalog my eats on LLL…I already do a weekly roundup for WIAW, but maybe I’ll try to do something a bit more frequent. After all, that’s what I had wanted to do when I initially started this blog! 🙂

So…anyone have some good ideas for vegetarian/pescetarian meals they’d like to share? Feel free to send me links! 🙂

Thanks for reading! Have a great Monday!