Monday, September 28, 2009

A Tale of 2 Cupcakes (Coconut and Non-Coconut)

This weekend my sister was in town to celebrate her birthday with the family.  I decided to try my hand at the birthday dessert and thought the coconut cupcake recipe would be great for the occasion.  Funny thing is, my sister is pretty sure she's allergic to coconut, and the majority of the rest of my family doesn't like coconut at all.  My husband and I really like coconut, though, so I had a bit of an ulterior motive for making these. 

My solution to this dilemma was to make the majority of the batch without the coconut.  I only made 2/3 of a recipe of these, because I thought that would be plenty.  The math got a little interesting (someone please explain why there is no 1/3 teaspoon?), but otherwise, the quantities worked well. 

I decided to aim for 12 cupcakes total, making only 3 of the coconut variety.  This almost went off without a hitch...  If you look closely at the picture below, you'll notice that the bottom left cupcake seems to be running out of the cupcake pan.  It seems this way because this is what it actually did.  I opened the oven after about 15 minutes of baking, and a large portion of coconut cupcake batter had bubbled out of the pan and into the bottom of the oven. 

It seems that the coconut cupcake batter was a lot more dense than the batter without the coconut, and this threw off the equilibrium of the pan, I guess.  Yes, it would have made sense to put the pan on a cookie sheet while baking in the oven to catch messes like these, but hey, I don't claim to be a logical thinking cook (because I'm not).   Also, when Ina says to fill the cupcake tins up with batter, be careful, because this is what I did and I ended up with huge cupcakes.  Not necessarily a bad thing, but just know what to expect. 



The finished cupcakes- non-coconut and coconut.  They were delicious despite the oven/batter debacle.  The non-coconut variety tasted like a really rich vanilla cupcake, which is what I was expecting.  The coconut cupcakes were wonderful also. 



All things considered, these cupcakes were delicious and I will definitely be making them again (with a little less batter in the tins and with a cookie sheet underneath). 

2 comments:

Carissa said...

I hope your family appreciated all the coconut hoops you had to jump through for them! Good story!

Ruth Stubbs said...

I looked at this recipe and thought about trying it without the coconut, but when I deviate too much from recipes, it usually ends up a disaster. I'm glad to hear that it worked for you because I'll probably try to make them without the coconut now. Thanks!