Coconut Cupcakes

It was my original intention to bake some cupcakes for Easter, but there were so many other things, I dropped this idea. But now that Easter is over and we've started running out of chocolate eggs, I thought I'd extend the sugar period for a bit.

So I had a quick shufty through all my recipe cards and found one that was quite near enough, however I didn't read it through before going shopping, so didn't have all the right ingredients and ended up improvising. However this turned out a good thing, because I think these are the nicest ones I've made by far - moist and soft, but not too crumbly and not too sweet.

Ingredients

Makes 13

Muffins
125 g unsalted butter at room temperature
225 g golden caster sugar
finely grated zest from 1 small lemon
4 large eggs
225 g plain flour
3 tsp baking powder
100 ml semi-skimmed milk

Icing
100 g unsalted butter at room temperature
150 g icing sugar
30 g desiccated coconut
2 tbsp kefir Filling and decoration
Lindt chocolate pralines with coconut filling
desiccated coconut for dipping

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 170 °C fan and line a muffin tin with paper cases.
2. Place the butter, caster sugar, lemon zest and eggs in a bowl.
3. Sift together the flour and baking powder together, making sure to mix well, then add to the bowl with ingredients.
4. Add the milk, then whisk together everything until light and fluffy and homogeneous.
5. Pour the batter into the muffin cases, filling them to about two-thirds.
6. Bake until golden brown and set, about 25 minutes, check them with a tooth pick - it should come out clean.
7. Remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool down completely
8. Make the icing by first stirring together the butter and icing sugar.
9. Once the icing sugar has been incorporated, add the coconut and the kefir and whisk until soft and fluffy.
10. When the muffins have cooled down, carefully cut out a hole in the middle, but keep the "lid".
11. Place one praline in the middle of the muffin, trim the "lid" and put a little of the icing on it, then replace on the muffin.
12. Spread icing on the muffins, then dip in the desiccated coconut.

Now the recipe called for medium sized eggs and I used large ones, so that might have increased the overall amount of batter, but I stubbornly divided it up into 12 muffin cases, which almost filled to capacity, with the usual result that there was a significant overflow during baking. I had to do some extensive trimming before I could start the decorations.

So I recommend the traditional approach with filling the cases about two-thirds before baking. I had some icing left over, just enough for a 13th cupcake.

Lundulph's thoughts are that the cupcakes were really nice and the praline in the middle was just soft enough to bite through, if it had been harder, it would have been weird. But the butter cream was a bit heavy for him and I think it'll need some further adjusting or perhaps just using mascarpone instead of butter.