Coconutters Cupcakes

As everyone is uncomfortably aware, September has well and truly shoved what is known as summer out of the way in order to drench us all with rain, chill us to the bone and then promptly blow us away.  In order to inject some last summer joy into proceedings, I went with the Hummingbird bakery’s coconut-flavoured cupcakes this week.  It perhaps says something about the English summer that to remind everyone of sunshine, I chose a fruit which cannot grow in England.

This week, Tom and I decided to be adventurous; rather than use coconut milk from a tin, we bought two real live furry coconuts and proceeded to dismantle them with nothing but our determination, wits and bare hands.  Well, sort of.  We had to use YouTube to look up the proper way to make holes in the coconut and how to break it in two (see the links at the bottom of the post), which is actually disappointingly simple.  The recipe called for 120ml of coconut milk, which we got out of one coconut, with a little extra left over.  The other one is sitting rather nervously by the sink, having watched its friend being stabbed through the eyes with a screwdriver, drained of its milk and then hammered until it split into two and had its innards gouged out.  I ended up using all the milk, as the mixture didn’t really taste particularly coconutty, but even this didn’t give it much flavour.  Elsewhere in The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook there is a recipe for a large coconut cake, which explains how to grate coconut.  I cooked the two halves at 170 degrees for fifteen minutes, then spent ages attempting to grate the flesh.  In the end I gave up on the adventurous way, and used desiccated coconut from a bag.  The cakes didn’t taste overwhelmingly of coconut, but at least the desiccated coconut gave it the familiar texture.

For the topping I used, predictably, the Hummingbird bakery’s chocolate icing and more desiccated coconut.  When I had thought about which flavour to go for, I remembered Bounty bars, which was probably the first food I ate which contained coconut, and opted for chocolate.  The recipe calls for a lot of icing sugar; 300g for one batch of twelve cakes.  As I was making two loads of cakes (see the Maltesers Cupcakes) I thought I would be stingy and make one and three quarters worth of the icing to divide between both.  I started with three quarters of the original recipe, and this spread to enough for both batches of cakes.  I love their icings; this one had a lip-lickingly delicious chocolate taste, which worked well with the understated sweetness of the cakes. 

These cakes turned out to be somewhat lacking in the summery coconut punch I wanted, a bit like the weather.  Next time I will leave the coconut, screwdriver and hammer to one side, and use tinned coconut milk instead.  (Tin openers are quite adventurous, aren’t they?  The way you pull them apart, that confident, scissor-action, could almost be reminiscent of a Swiss Army knife, plus you have to avoid cutting your fingers on the edge of the lid when you throw it away.)  The desiccated coconut did give the cakes texture, and they were nice and light.  The chocolate worked well with the flavouring, and I quite like the colours together.  The original recipe used pineapple rings, which maybe would have given it more flavour, but that’s an exotic twist for another time.

If you fancy a glimpse of summer, these cakes will add a ray of sunshine to a gloomy day; just don’t get too adventurous.

If you still want to live on the edge and use milk straight from the coconut, find out how to drain a coconut here, on a website with the most self-explanatory domain name ever.

If having drained the coconut you want to break it in half and eat its insides (or clap the two halves together to make horse sounds), find out how to do this here.