Roopa
I felt like making something a little unconventional today, so I decided on coconut mango cupcakes. I don’t really enjoy coconut, but it seems to be a pretty well liked flavour and I had coconut milk at home, so I thought I’d try something with it.
I kind of just threw some ingredients together, and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. I don’t feel like the coconut really came through, but as one who doesn’t like coconut, I wasn’t too upset. If you are a coconut aficionado, it would probably be a good idea to add some coconut flakes to the batter. The mango wasn’t strong either, so I’d probably add some chopped pieces to the batter next time as well. That said, they still tasted quite good. They were also super moist and rose really well, and generally had a good texture.
The icing was a different story altogether…
I’ll get to that later.
COCONUT MANGO CUPCAKES
Makes 10 medium sized cupcakes
- ¾ cup (112 g) all purpose flour
- 1 tbsp. cocoa powder
- 60 g packed brown sugar
- 15 g granulated sugar
- ¾ tsp. baking powder
- ½ tsp. baking soda
- pinch of salt
- 2 tbsp. (30g) unsalted butter, very soft
- ½ cup coconut milk
- 105 g mango puree
DIRECTIONS
- Preheat oven to 350F, and line cupcake tin.
- Sift together flour and cocoa powder. Add in sugars, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Mix at low speed.
- Add in softened butter. I melted it slightly in the microwave so it would mix in easily.
- Add coconut milk and mango puree into flour mixture, and mix at low speed until combined, scraping sides of bowl as needed. Don’t overmix.
- Fill liners 2/3 full. Bake for 13 – 20 minutes, depending on liner size. Toothpick should come out clean, and top of cupcake should spring back when pressed gently.
Now, on to the less successful part of this particular baking endeavour. I thought I’d try create a coconut vanilla icing, which I did. I decided to add coconut milk into a butter-icing sugar mixture in place of cream, and thought that would give it a good coconut flavour. Flavour, yes. Texture, not so much. I think you need to boil coconut milk prior to adding it to icing, because it just did NOT work. Better yet, I made way too much, and now I have a tub of this blue coconut concoction sitting in my fridge. Yes, blue. In my brilliance, I decided to add blue food colouring, since I felt that would be an appropriate coconut icing colour. You know what makes separated icing look worse? Blue food colouring.
A prime example of what icing should not look like.
I should clarify here that this icing tastes excellent. It’s got enough coconut to taste, but doesn’t overwhelm, and some vanilla. Taste was never the issue. I did my best to salvage the cupcakes after this icing shambles. Basically, I put very large icing flowers over top in hopes of obscuring people’s view of the icing.
Large flowers! I think it sort of worked?
Chateau Gateau 