Celebration Dessert

For dessert at the celebration dinner I made Coconut - Lime Cupcakes. When I first got my cupcake cook book as a wedding present these were the first cupcakes I made. This was pre blog. The first step in making the Coconut lime cupcakes (CLC) is to make a normal vanilla cupcake with coconut extract instead of vanilla extract and shredded coconut. Then after the cupcakes cool you core out the middle in order to create a pocket for the lime curd. I used a paring knife and cut in a circular motion. The tricks are do not great too deep of a pocket and do not cut your hand.


Cored out cupcakes half with lime curd.

To make the lime curd requires the zest of two limes and there juice as you can see by the picture below cutting, zesting and juicing require several kitchen tool. I think whisked together the lime juice, sugar, egg yolks butter and zest over low heat. The result something delicious. I then filled the cooled cupcakes.


Next step making the coconut buttercream. Now as I stated I had made the cupcakes before and the first time I made them the buttercream turned about perfect. The last two times I tried to make buttercream Christmas cupcakes and Chocolate cupcakes the buttercream turned out really thick and has the coistnacy of butter with a bit of vanilla floaoring. The cupcakes I have made since then I have either made a different icing or used store bought :( But today I wanted to try my hand a buttercream. This time I made sure the butter and and egg whites were at room temperature. The first step of a successful buttercream is combining the egg whites and sugar together in a bowl over a pot of hot water and stirring like crazy until the sugar is totally dissolved. I made sure not to skimp on the timing of this step and that the sugar was very warm to the touch.

Then I poured the mixture into our electric mixer and stirred on high for 6 minutes. I made sure the mixture was forming stiff peaks. Then I added the butter in slowly, two pieces at a time and made sure they were well mixed in. This process took a while because you use 16 pieces. At the end of this process I had created a perfect buttercream. Creating a buttercream is tricky and requires finesse but in the end it is well worth it and taste way better then store bought icing.

After the icing was made i added in coconut extract and put it in a piping bag and then iced the cupcakes with swirls of icing and dusted them with coconut. Delicious.