The Almond Joy Cupcake

I know, its been too long!  We've had a few busy weeks and a round of dud cupcakes.  I attempted the coconut cupcake a few weeks ago and it was just not good.  It was dry and it tasted nothing like coconut SO I didn't think it was worth talking about :)

This week was a different story - I made the most delicious coconut cupcakes ever!  Topped with chocolate frosting and a milk chocolate covered almond.....I've named it the Almond Joy cupcake.

Here's my recipe for the cupcakes - there's a lot of different coconut substitutions but its worth it - you get the best coconut flavor:

Ingredients

• 1 cup white sugar
• 6 tbl spns butter
• ½ cup coconut cream
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons coconut extract
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 cup coconut milk
• ½ cup coconut flakes

Directions

1.     Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9x9 inch pan or line a muffin pan with paper liners.

2.     In a medium bowl, cream together the sugar, butter and coconut cream. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the coconut extract. Combine flour and baking powder, add to the creamed mixture and mix well. Finally stir in the coconut milk until batter is smooth. Hand mix in the coconut flakes, don't over mix. Pour or spoon batter into the prepared pan.

3.     For cupcakes, bake 20 to 25 minutes. Cake is done when it springs back to the touch.

To top them off I wanted to create a chocolate frosting.  I made my usual buttercream and then made a chocolate ganache and mixed it in to the frosting.  Very good flavor but it was too melty for me.  I need a frosting that can be out of the fridge without looking droopy!  I'll need to perfect this my next go around - more confectioner's sugar is usually the answer for a droopy frosting so I'll try that first.  Any suggestion's on making a good chocolate frosting that is easy to decorate with would be great!

I also wanted to mention a class I took recently with a friend of mine.  It was called specialty cake decorating.  Basically it was how to make and use fondant, how to ice a cake and then how to build a tiered cake and decorate it.  It was really fun. I wish I had known we needed to have a design ready when we took the class - I didn't like how mine came out but it was really fun and I learned a lot.  Fondant is never something I ever want to make....there's way too much work involved!!  I did enjoy creating with it though...its just like play dough!  It doesn't taste very good though....

Here's my creation:

Thanks for reading!  I'll be making some cupcakes for a work party this week so stay tuned....

Memorial Day Cupcakes

Happy Memorial Day!  Well, Happy Belated Memorial Day!

I was busy over Memoriald Day weekend making some fun cupcakes for our Memorial Day BBQ.  I started out by making my french vanilla cupcake receipe, except this time I added 1/2 cup of applesauce to try and get a more moist cake.  It was definitely much better this time but still needs more vanilla and maybe a tad more moistness still. 

So my goal was to make hamburger cupcakes!  I started out by cutting my vanilla cupcakes in half.  I mixed up some green frosting and put it into my icing bag with the leaf tip and off I went decorating the bottom half of the vanilla cupcake with what I was hoping would look like lettuce.  Next was the burger...I had frozen some of my chocolate cupcakes from the last batch, so out of the freezer those came to defrost and then I cut those in half too. I then took a half of a chocolate cupcake and put it on top of the 'lettuce'.  Next I mixed up some red frosting and drizzled that over the top to look like ketchup - here I am at this point:

Next came yellow icing for mustard and then put the top half of the vanilla cupcake back on and sprinkled some sesame seeds on the top so it looked like a bun!  What do you think?

With the rest of the vanilla cupcakes I decided to go patriotic.  I took the rest of the red frosting from the "ketchup" I made and put that into my icing bag and then put some white icing in on top of that.  That gave it the 'tie dyed' look you see below:

The blue I did after the red ran out of the bag - just added blue frosting to the white that was already in my bag and then started icing.  You'll notice that some of them have a darker color than others - that just means it was closer to the end of the white at the time.

All in all it was a really fun project!  Next up I think I might try a friend of mine's recipe for coconut cupcakes!  MMM but what kind of frosting? Any suggestions?