Conveneience store cupcakes-redone part two

As fun as it was to revisit a cupcake idea I had previous done. I was much more excited to try out something new. Snowball cupcakes. They would look just like those little pretty pink cakes that I always thought would be better than they actually tasted, only these would be tasty, or at least that was my hope.

For number eight, I used the same chocolate cake recipe and filling as I did for number seven of my 26 before 26 quest.

One of the things I was looking forward to was dying my coconut. I had never done this before, and even though shaking a container full of food coloring and coconut may not be everybody's idea of a good time, I was jazzed. The first time I dyed my coconut, it was too red. Not a red red, more of a Sarah Goldfarb red. A strange dark pink/orange/red combo. Luckily I  had just enough to do over. The second time around they came out a very lovely and dainty shade of pink.

By the time it came to the frosting, I was pooped. I thought about making something from Martha Stewart, or numerous other places. Seeing some recipes prepared with fluff, I had bought some at the store on Monday when getting all my supplies. What I didn't get was cream of tartar, which just about all of the other recipes called for. So on Thursday night after work, it was decision time. I could go to the store again, or make some fluff butter cream. The more I thought about it, I didn't want to mix my fluff with butter. I liked fluff how it was, and I wanted a very marshmallow-ey taste.

I decided to use the fluff in it's natural form. Each cake was topped with a big mound of fluff, and then pretty, pink coconut shavings were mushed into it.

They were lovely. The picture of perfection. It did not last long.

By the time I put them all away in the fridge, I noticed the fluff was sliding. I was worried because I was all out of the good coconut and there was not incomplete coverage. I wasn't sure if I wanted to take them to work anymore, but I needed enough to feed everybody. I decided that having the pink coconut look more like a garnish than a thick, plush blanket of coconut goodness was still good enough.


The next morning I woke to an awful sight. I wasn't terribly surprised. I went to bed feeling uneasy, and when I woke up before my alarm, I actually got up to check on my cakes instead of savoring those last 10 minutes of sleep. When I looked in my fridge I saw that more than half of the fluff was all the way off of the cupcakes, dripping down the sides of the liners, onto the tray and even on to the innocent chocolate cupcakes below.

With zero time to waste, I scraped the fluff off of all the cupcakes, ditched the cute little aluminum liners and set them in some ill-fitting pastel ones. Yuck. A frantic search on my iphone lead me to this recipe from Paula Deen. I love Miss Paula. She loves butter and her teeth are a frightening shade of white. Plus there is this, which makes me laugh while creeping me the fuck out. This is like the salad fingers of our time.



Anyway, I got down a double boiler I had bought at a thrift store a few months ago and got to work.

I honestly don't know where I went wrong. Maybe it was the pan, maybe the mixer, maybe the corn syrup. The double boiler makes it almost impossible for water to get in and ruin the party, but perhaps that is what happened, because the entire thing seized up. The beginning of the recipe is very much like swiss meringue, which I have no problem with. But this was not happening. When I hit the seven minute mark, my sugar was still grainy. Not just a little grainy, but super grainy. I kept going on, hoping it would fix itself. After about 12 minutes I gave up. The frosting had a terrible texture, but was tasty. I ended up putting it on the cupcakes. It wasn't very good at all, but I think I was bothered by it more than anybody else. The silver lining is that these were covered in so much Sarah Goldfarb red coconut that the gritty texture kind of blended in with the texture of to coconut.

I would like to say that they looked better in person, but yeah.. nope.

They definitely weren't the lovely, light pink beauties I had imagined, but I am just happy that they made it to my break room. This will be one to revisit, but not for a long while.