Vegan vanilla cupcakes with chocolate cream cheese icing

My hosted a dinner party tonight for my brother's confirmation yesterday. My mum is one of those Asian mums that really like to go all out with guns a blazing. She was up early in the morning cooking and spent the whole day in the kitchen. She ended up cooking something like a five course meal. There were prawn crackers, deep fried quail, huge prawns on skewers, Vietnamese squid salad, vegan stir-fry, pork and seafood noodle soup (hu tieu do bien) and a Vietnamese sweet dessert (che ba ba). So everyone pretty much got full on the first five dishes I listed and when she brought out the main main meal everyone probably wished they wore their stretchy pants. 

My dad asked me to make some cupcakes for the dinner party too, since there would be lots of kiddies. I decided to make some of the vegan cupcakes that I made for the Warrior Dash fundraising. Instead of making strawberry icing, I made chocolate cream cheese icing instead. You can find the recipe inside the book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

I really liked this icing because the addition of melted chocolate made the icing firmer and so when I piped the icing onto the cakes, the nice swirly shape held better. This recipe would be good for anyone who doesn't have much time to let the icing to chill. 

I didn't really get a chance to get any good photos of the cupcakes, and my camera is back at the shops to get repaired after I dropped it :( 

I got some great photos of my cousin Vera chowing down on her cupcake. I love that precious little thing. She's got one of the best personalities. Everything she does cracks me up. When I saw her today, she was in a "what's that?" phase where she'll go around the room, pointing at everything and asking "what's that?". There was this one moment where she was about to throw a tantrum because she wanted to get picked up by her mum, but then she saw a colourful stool under my desk and immediately stooped crying and asked "what's that?". Too cute!