Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero

This book is physically tiny, but packed with fun and information! All of the facts and tips about baking vegan cupcakes are interspersed with bits of whimsy--sometimes even educational whimsy. There's an A to Z list of why vegan cupcakes are awesome. Then there's a list of all the ingredients and tools you'll want for your adventures in vegan cupcake baking with explanations as to why. Even if you're fairly new to veganism or to baking, this book will be useful; everything is explained in great, but not boring, detail, and there's even a few pages of troubleshooting tips for specific problems with your cupcakes. Then there's the recipes! Plain vanilla, plain chocolate, gluten-free, and even diabetic-friendly cupcakes are included as the basic recipes. Then they get creative. There are so many different recipes it's hard to imagine having time to bake them all. And that's just the cupcakes. The book includes a multitude of different icing recipes (and tips for applying the icing to the cupcakes) as well. I imagine if you tried a different cupcake-and-icing combination every day, you wouldn't run out for a year.

And the cupcakes aren't hurt by the lack of dairy and eggs. Not at all. Assuming you follow the recipes and instructions carefully, the cupcakes are light, sweet, spongy, and just plain delicious. When I baked a batch of the plain vanilla cupcakes with vegan buttercream frosting, they were devoured within days by my suitemates. The buttercream frosting recipe probably made three times as much as was required to frost the cupcakes, but that's okay--it was devoured as well. Yum!

Vive le Vegan by Dreena Burton

While I admit to not having much basis for comparison, it's my opinion that this cookbook is perfect for people like me who are new to vegan cooking and want easy, tasty meals, snacks, and desserts. There are a ton of good recipes as well as lots of useful information, such as cooking times for grains and beans and a whole section on the benefits of hemp. I made the "Peanut 'Better' Cookies" and the "Homestyle Chocolate Chip Cookies" and they both turned out delicious. I'd like to make the banana pancakes and lentil soup soon, too. I'll have to go shopping to make a lot of the recipes in this book, but that's more a reflection on my family's pantry than on the book! I love that it's all whole foods and there's a great variety of grains and protein sources. Though I don't have any trouble with wheat, I think it's great that most of the recipes are wheat-free or could easily be made wheat-free. It's also really cool that very few of the recipes use "fake" vegan products. A couple of them use vegan cheese and/or vegan ground round, but for the most part there's no attempt to imitate non-vegan food--the recipes are great, healthy meals on their own.

There's also a large section on raising vegan infants and children, explaining how and when to introduce different kinds of solid food (based on advice given by the author's midwife). I don't have reason to use that yet, but I expect to someday, and it seems like a really good resource. Overall, I'm thrilled to have received this book as my first vegan cookbook.