February 16th, 2011

Coconut Cream Cupcakes

Coconut cupcakes Part 2 starts here. I frosted the tops of the cupcakes with the same coconut frosting, then rolled them in toasted sweetened coconut flakes.

As you can tell, this was like semi-homemade since I used the box cake and bought sweetened coconut flakes. My previous coconut cake from two weeks ago was far more advanced with every last thing from scratch - coconut cracking fresh.

But these were a lot more moist than all of my from-scratch cakes, so I fell back on the box after several disappointing cake textures. Everyone loved these and they disappeared almost immediately. Sweet decadence. I can still smell the sugar coconut in the air.

This was a request by the way, from a coconut loving birthday coworker.

February 15th, 2011

Filling the coconut cupcakes

These are my half-complete coconut cupcakes. It's a basic yellow vanilla cake mix. Instead of water, I used coconut water. I added pudding mix for moisture. I added coconut extract for amazing flavor.

I then made a coconut frosting from scratch - which was a little runnier than I wanted, but still fluffy, sweet and most important coconutty. It was infused with coconut extract also, along with coconut milk.

I filled up a pastry bag with the frosting, buried the end into each cupcake and squeezed until the tops bulged and threatened to split.

That was Part 1.