A couple days ago I had a hankering for some coconut cupcakes. Yum! I went online and found a few recipes. After looking through all of them I had it narrowed down to Martha’s recipe and the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe. It wasn’t a hard choice when I looked at the ingredients – the Barefoot Contessa wanted me to use SIX sticks of butter for 20 cupcakes! Are you kidding me? So naturally I went with Martha.
I used this recipe here – but of course I am terrible at following directions. So I goofed a little. When I was reading the instructions it said to pre-heat the oven (check!), then to whisk all the dry ingredients together. So I did that…. then it said to cream the butter and sugar together. Damn it Martha! Sugar is a dry ingredient! I had only butter and coconut milk in my sad wet ingredient bowl and then this big dry ingredient bowl with flour, baking powder, salt, coconut and of course sugar.
I continued to mix – I figured if these cupcakes came out bad that I would blame it all on Martha. So I went ahead and mixed in my eggs (one at a time) – because after the wet ingredient dry ingredient fiasco I learned my lesson. Always read the whole paragraph! Then I mixed in my dry ingredients in three batches (like Martha said). The batter looked a little thick and kind of sticky after mixing in all the ingredients – so I just added more coconut milk until I thought the consistency looked right. If they were too gooey I’m not sure who I would have blamed that one on.
So I line my cupcakes with these brand new silicone cupcake liners that I got at Bed Bath & Beyond and fill them up 2/3 of the way – into the oven they go! Here I go to make some frosting. Now again being bad at directions – “nah – I don’t like Martha’s frosting recipe, I’ll make up my own.” I knew I wanted a cream cheese frosting and pulled it out of the fridge a while ago to bring it up to room temp. I mixed the cream cheese with 1/2 a stick of butter the rest of the coconut milk, about 1 to 1 1/2 cups of powdered sugar (I lost track) and a about 2-3 tsp of lemon juice and 3-4 tsp of vanilla extract. Mixed it all together till it tasted right. It was good! But a little runny.
About 25 minutes later the cupcakes were ready to come out of the oven. They looked normal and cupcake like. I did it!
I waited till they were cool and frosted them and then sprinkled coconut over the frosting. I took a bite – they were oh so yummy! Rory didn’t really like them all that much since he doesn’t like cream cheese frosting. I was not aware of this. But he ate the cakes that weren’t frosted yet. He loved those – they were very moist.
Since I only had one cupcake tin I make a cake out of the rest of the batter. I think it came out good…. it looks good, but I haven’t tried it. The only thing is that it took about twice as long to bake. I am going to bring it to the shop tomorrow so that I don’t eat it all up. All in all the coconut cupcake endeavor was quite the success. I would have liked it to me more coconut flavored, maybe next time I’ll use six sticks of butter for more coconut flavor.
