Maple Cupcakes with Rich Maple Frosting

Maple syrup is so sweet and so very Canadian, so what better recipe to write about on Canadian Thanksgiving.  I was inspired by the Rich Maple Frosting recipe on VeganBaking.net to create a maple cupcake with maple frosting.

The recipe for the cupcake itself is the Maple Cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.  Every recipe I have tried so far from this book has produced beautiful, delicious cupcakes of all different flavors!  I took their advice and tried substituting some of the all-purpose flour for whole wheat pastry flour with great results.

The Rich Maple Frosting recipe is the one that I linked above from VeganBaking.net.  The frosting was a bit tricky to make - I'm not sure if I did it properly since you had to heat the maple syrup and agave nectar over the stove and get it to a certain temperature... and then after refrigerating it for an hour, you had to blend it with margarine/vegetable shortening.  After doing this, the icing was quite runny, which it said may happen, and if it does, to refrigerate it.  No amount of refrigerating seemed to harden the frosting enough!  Not only that, but I found the recipe to be way too sweet for my liking.  It seemed to over-power the flavor of the cupcake and I found myself wiping off most of the icing...and I really didn't put too much frosting on these cupcakes to begin with.

With that said, Paul absolutely loved the cupcakes and wants me to make more!  He said that the Maple Frosting was perfect to his liking.  I have lots of leftover frosting so he may even use it as a topping for pancakes or waffles...or I will just have to make some more cupcakes for the icing.  I guess it is all just personal preference!