A Plant-Based Easter Weekend

Pictured: Vegan deviled eggs, carrot cake cupcakes and my neighbour’s infamous spanakopita (unfortunately not vegan, but would love to try making a vegan version one day!)

Happy Easter! I hope you had a wonderful long weekend.

Although Easter looked a bit different this year, my family celebrated with a BBQ because the weather was so nice and it allowed us to stay socially distanced outdoors with our small group of 5.

I had a chance to try out two Easter-themed vegan recipes this past weekend - deviled “eggs” and carrot cake cupcakes! While I love creating my own recipes, I am always looking to try recipes that are already out there to expand my horizons.

I first saw this vegan deviled eggs recipe shared by Tabitha Brown on Instagram. I hadn’t had deviled eggs in so long but missed them dearly, so I was very excited about this creative alternative. She uses pickled white mushrooms as the base and fills them with a chickpea “yolk”. The key ingredient is the black salt which helps give it an eggy flavour. I found a great written version of the recipe here.

This recipe worked out really well, and the deviled “eggs” were a hit. We were so surprised with how similar the chickpea filling tasted to egg yolk! After soaking in the pickle juice, the mushrooms do get quite soggy, so this texture might throw people off. However if you’re a fan of pickled things, you’ll love the mushroom base.

I’ve seen some other creative vegan deviled egg substitutes, so I’m going to keep trying out new recipes and updating here. I’m obsessed with the filling from this recipe and have put the leftovers on wraps as an egg salad substitute.

The other new recipe I tried was these vegan carrot cake cupcakes from Rainbow Nourishments. I’m honestly still getting the hang of vegan baking, so I have been clinging to the comfort of pre-existing recipes. I hope to one day be able to create my own baking recipes, but for now I’m still perfecting the skill.

These carrot cake cupcakes were a very satisfying Easter treat - they were both dense and moist, and the vegan cream cheese icing complemented them perfectly. I ended up adding a bit of extra oat milk and avocado oil to the recipe than what was called for, as I found my batter to be quite stiff and hard to mix. However, you may not need to do this if you have a sturdy beater.

I made the recipe for 24 cupcakes, and ended up having some extra batter once I filled the cupcake tins. I used this to fill a thin layer of a round cake pan and made a little cake with the extra batter! Despite being a thin cake, the density of the cupcakes helped keep it sturdy and a small slice of the cake was a perfect desert portion.

I’m a huge fan of carrot cake and haven’t had it since going plant-based - these cupcakes definitely lived up to my expectations and I will certainly be making them again in the future!

PS - Did you know that paper muffin/cupcake liners are compostable? Check out what they say about them on Waterloo’s waste whiz!