Simple Gluten-Free Chocolate Cupcakes | Liv Baking

Hi Bold Bakers! I'm here with Olivia Crouppen, my alternative baking expert. She's got a great chocolate recipe to share with you today. You're in good hands, so take it away Liv. One of my all-time favorite desserts is a chocolate cupcake. These gluten and sugar-free chocolate cupcakes have a double dose of chocolate. Thanks to my two-ingredient chocolate frosting, I promise it is possible to make cupcakes good for you. Get ready, I'm going to show you guys how. To start off our gluten-free chocolate cupcakes, we're going to mix up our wet ingredients. So it starts off with some eggs. If you don't want to use eggs, you can absolutely substitute flax egg here, and that would actually make these vegan as well. And then we're going to go in with some coconut oil. I really like to bake with coconut oil because it's a really good source of healthy fat, nice neutral flavor. To follow up the coconut oil, we're going to do some coconut milk. Just a little bit, and this is going to keep everything really, really moist and rich. And it kind of like tenderizes the cupcake, almost like buttermilk or sour cream would in a typical recipe. Okay, so next up is our sugar. This is not your average sugar, this is a sugar alternative. I really like to bake with sugar alternatives. This one happens to be derived from monk fruit, and it is vegan and totally natural. So we're going to go in with this. Awesome. And then the last thing is our vanilla. You cannot make anything sweet without vanilla. As Gem would say, this really like seasons the cupcake. Okay, so now we're just going to whisk this together, and you'll see it'll come together and be super rich. These are just like making your everyday cupcake with just a few swaps. So we're halfway there. Wet ingredients, check. Now we're going to move on to our dry ingredients. I'm just going to set this aside. Okay, so I have a big bowl. I like to work with a nice big bowl. So our dry ingredients start off with coconut flour. I love to bake with coconut flour because it's naturally gluten-free, it's vegan, and it's wheat-free. If you've never used it before, it's actually just dried coconut that has been ground into a fine powder. It's really nice and actually keeps things super moist. The star of the show is chocolate. These are chocolate cupcakes after all. So this is a really nice Dutch process cocoa powder, but you don't have to use Dutch process, but I would suggest you use a really high quality unsweetened cocoa because, again, this is like what's going to flavor your cupcakes. It's all about the chocolate. Some of you might be wondering if you could use hot chocolate powder or a sweetened cocoa. I would not suggest that in this case. You really want to go for like a pure, high quality cocoa, and again, because you have that sweetener, you don't need to worry about if it's going to be sweet enough. So we've got cocoa powder, we've got coconut flour, and now, pretty standard, we have raising agent. Make everything nice and fluffy, and then we're going to do salt. So with that, that is the end of our dry ingredients. We're going to get these all mixed together, and you can see the ratio of chocolate to coconut flour is like 70 chocolate, 30 coconut flour, and that's how you know it's going to be super chocolatey. So a little fun fact about coconut flour is that it absorbs liquid a little bit differently than a nut-based flour or a wheat-based flour, and I really like to use it in cupcakes, cakes, anything that you really want like a super moist texture to because it really holds in all that liquid. Now we got our dry, we got our wet, it's just a matter of combining the two, and we're halfway to gluten-free chocolate cupcakes. So let's do the thing, shall we? This is really coming together nicely. It almost looks like brownie batter, which is a good sign. This batter, because of the coconut flour and the amount of cocoa that you have in there, you cannot over-mix it, unlike a regular flour that has gluten. This doesn't really develop any gluten, which is typically what would cause over-mixing. It's really nice, you can kind of just go to town. If you want to make this batter ahead of time, you totally can because it only gets better after it rests. Look at that. This is a party in a pan. I have lined this 12-well cupcake tin with some really fun colored liners. One of my favorite things about these cupcakes is not just the way that they taste, but the way that they look. I think it's so fun to have the colorful sprinkles and the different colored papers. So if you want to do them without a liner, you totally can, but I think it's really fun to interject some color in there. I'm going to fill these about two-thirds of the way full, and I'm going to do it with a spoon. I find filling cupcake tins to be not the most fun because sometimes it gets a little messy, gets stuck around the outsides. That's why I like to use a spoon and go nice and slow. Now that our cupcake liners are all full, I'm going to just take a little minute and clean up the edges here. Like I said, sometimes I make a mess. That's okay. I'm just going to take a little paper towel and wipe up the edges. These are ready to roll. Let's get them into the oven. Bake your cupcakes off at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 180 degrees Celsius for about 25 minutes. While they're in the oven, we are going to get going on our two-ingredient frosting. Our chocolate frosting is going to start in a large bowl. It's only made of two ingredients. It's completely sugar-free, and it is also vegan. I can't imagine that anyone wouldn't want to give this a try. It starts with a can of coconut milk. I like to use a full-fat coconut milk. No skimping here. This is a sugar-free bar of chocolate that I use all the time when I'm baking. It's great for melting. It's also just great for snacking. If you can't use sugar-free chocolate or you can't find it, you can always use regular, but I highly suggest that you give this a try. We're going to just get that in there to our coconut milk. So now that our chocolate and our coconut milk are combined, we're going to pop this into the microwave. If you don't have a microwave, you can always do this over a bain-marie or a double boiler. Our coconut milk and our chocolate has nicely melted together, so now we're just going to whisk it until it's smooth and shiny, and it'll sort of resemble a thick chocolate sauce. So now this has come together really nicely. We're just going to pop it in the fridge and make sure it gets nice and firm. So here is my chilled frosting. I made this one a little bit earlier to give it time to set up. I like to do this for around an hour, but you can do it overnight. It's a great make-ahead frosting. As you can see, it's nice and firm to the touch. So we're just going to go ahead and hit it with our hand mixer. You could also use a whisk and a little bit of elbow grease if you'd prefer, and make sure that it is just nice and fluffy and spreadable so that we can pipe it on our cupcakes. Look at it. It is light. It is fluffy. It's perfect for piping. So now that this is all fluffed up, we're going to get it into our piping bag, and it's time for the best part, which is decorating our cupcakes. So that was my timer. My cupcakes are all done. They look awesome. You can tell they're super moist and fudgy, and when you press on the center, they're nice and springy, which is great. We're going to just set these aside and let them cool. So now it's the moment we've all been waiting for. It's time to decorate our cupcakes. So I'm just going to grab them. Okay, these are our cooled cupcakes. They look awesome, but obviously they're about to get a lot better. So I have all my cupcakes set here, and now I'm just going to top them with a generous amount of my chocolate frosting and, of course, rainbow sprinkles. I'm really excited about these. I love how fun they look. I've got a mix of little round sprinkles and these longer rainbow ones, but use whatever you have around. It's just time to go to town. So because this frosting is made with coconut milk, it's super rich and can tend to be on the softer side, but when you pop it in the fridge, it will firm up really nicely, similar to the texture that it was before you whipped it up. Time for sprinkles. We're going to make it rain, guys. We're just going to make it rain rainbow sprinkles. Look how fun that is. Immediately, these just look so fun. So as you can tell, I love rainbow sprinkles. I'm so excited to give one a try, but before I dig in, I think there is someone that I might want to share with. Sprinkles. Check it out. I made these for us to share. Oh. Oh, it's yum. Yeah? Yeah. These are just like devil's food cake. Like really moist and nice and like dark. Happy day. And frosting. Thoughts on the frosting? It's yum. No, it's really delicious. It's nice and smooth. It's a really moist good job. The recipe for these gluten-free chocolate cupcakes is on BiggerBolderBaking.com, so get into your kitchen right now and give these a try. Gemma approved. Olivia, can I have another one? You can have anything. You can have anything you want.