Eggless Cup Cakes to celebrate July 4th

I saw these cupcakes few months back on this blog 'Evolving Tastes'. She has an amazing blog and all her dishes are awesome. I have made these cup cakes several times since then, sometimes using mini muffin cups and sometimes the regular ones. These cup cakes literally take 10 min to assemble and don't really require a mixer or any additional gadget. My 8yr old daughter assembes them with the help of my 3 yr old son and I just put into the mould and put in the oven and bake. Both my kids absolutely adore these cakes and I made them for both their birthday parties this year.

So enjoy the July 4th weekend with these yummy cakes... The recipe is noted here with slight modifications from the original. I skipped the coffee and substituted vegetable oil with butter (I feel it is ok to indulge and use butter with cakes and cookies, but use vegetable oil if you want. It tastes good with vegetable oil...)

Ingredients
Makes 6

3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tea spoon baking powder
a big pinch of salt
1/4 cup milk, or a little more if needed
1/4 cup butter (I substituted butter for vegetable oil from the original recipe)
1/2 tea spoon vanilla extract (you can skip this if you don't have it)


How To

Preheat oven to 350F. Line muffin cups with paper liners.
In a large bowl, sift together flour, cocoa power, sugar, baking powder and salt.
In a medium bowl, mix together milk, vegetable oil and vanilla extract. Pour into dry ingredients and mix until everything is combined well.
Distribute batter evenly into prepared muffin cups, filling each about 3/4th full.
Bake for 18-20 minutes, until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

Remove from the oven to cool completely, before digging in...
And if you can't wait, eat it while it is still warm... I love mine hot from the oven. How do you like yours ?