I could hardly wait to share this recipe with you as I think you’ll love these syrup-infused orange semolina cupcakes! Last time I baked these was before I went vegan and I remember it well for a reason.
I made them into a cake for the French TV crew who came to film us for an episode of a French travel show Echappées Belles. The episode was about several Cycladic Islands and foreigners who chose to live on them. The producers seemed quite keen on our back story of escaping the rat race in the search of Aegean-tinted bliss. Duncan did a lot of stand-up comedy back in London so he was quite comfortable in front of the camera. I, on the other hand, looked like I should have downed some whiskey before the filming started (I wish I had thought of that). The worst off though was our poor cat, Noodle. The producers were quite keen to include him in one of the ‘domestic bliss on a Greek island’ scenes but, as luck would have it, two days before the filming, we applied a “spot-on” flea treatment on him. Being new and very inexperienced pet owners, we must have applied the medication incorrectly as Noodle managed to eat it and fell seriously sick the day after. He was really, really poorly and so he ended up looking extremely miserable on camera. Poor thing! Luckily, he pulled through. Sick cat episode aside, it was funny and a little bit cring-e-y to see yourself on TV. And the cake went down so well that I’ve decided to have a crack at veganising it and re-packaging it in the form of cute, individual cupcakes. They turned out great and all my omni neighbours were scoffing them down with approving murmurs so I’m confident you’ll like them too.
50 g / ½ cup desiccated coconut 60 g / scant 1/3 cup brown sugar 70 g / ½ cup + 1 tbsp plain flour, sifted 135 g / ¾ cup fine semolina (for cakes) 1½ tbsp ground almonds / almond flour 1½ tsp baking powder chopped pistachios or almonds, to decorate (optional)
SYRUP
360 ml / 1½ cup orange juice 100 g / ½ cup sugar (I used brown)
Cup measurement I use is 1 cup = 240 ml (rounded up from 236.6 ml). As baking is a science, I recommend weighing all your dry ingredients and using metric volume measurement for liquids. I have converted metric measurements into cups, but some values do not lend themselves well to this conversion so they are approximations only. This recipe is an a vegan adaptation of Yotam Ottolenghi’s ‘Semolina, coconut and marmalade cake’ from his gorgeous ‘Jerusalem’ cookbook.
