Crumbs Bake Shop Red Velvet Cupcakes

I didn’t know this but Crumbs Bakeshop, one of the early cupcake-only bakeries, closed all their doors, filing bankruptcy in 2014. I looked into them in the cupcake heyday (2003/2004), but they never had a vegan option. Then, eventually, they offered some vegan options–I’m not sure when this happened. I was kind of bummed I was never able to try them. Thankfully, their vegan Red Velvet recipe lives on via YouTube. I gave it a try for several reasons… I still had some cream cheese frosting left from my Red Velvets last week, the recipe was super easy, and I had all of the ingredients already. I also wanted to compare it to the more labor-intensive Sprinkles batch from last week… to see what would be my Red Velvet go-to…

Crumbs Bake Shop Red Velvet Cupcakes

I left the recipe, which I adapted slightly, in metric because most items weren’t clean conversions to Standard units. And, while measuring with my digital kitchen scale, I realized how much easier working with grams (and not a million measuring cups) was! I know that bakers prefer the precision of measuring out ingredients by weight, so that’s a perk too.

245 g almond milk

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

110g canola oil

1/4 tsp red gel food coloring

200g plain flour

10g cocoa powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp salt

200g granulated sugar

1.) Pre-heat oven to 350 and line a cupcake pan with liners.

2.) Combine the wet in a large bowl: milk, vanilla, apple cider vinegar and oil and red gel food coloring, and whisk well.

3.) Set small bowl onto scale and set to 0. Add 200 g of flour and set back to 0. Add 10 g of cocoa powder. Then add baking soda, baking powder and salt. Sift this into the wet then add the sugar. Whisk until there are no lumps.

4.) Divide batter and get into the oven, baking for 20-22 minutes.

I bought these neat sprinkles from Supernatural, a very exciting all-plant based addition to my baking world.

Here they are, looking gorgeous. I am mostly in love with this perfect cream cheese frosting, detailed here.

And they are delicious, moist and delicate. And considering the ease of the recipe, I think this recipe may be my new go-to.