Coconut & Raspberry Cupcakes with Coconut Cream Icing

20/02/2012 by Jenny 13 Comments

What do you do when you’ve got half a tin of “rich & creamy coconut milk” lurking when you’ve made a Thai curry?? Make cakes, of course. You’ll need

3 large eggs

150g butter – softened

150g caster sugar

150g self-raising flour

about ¼ can coconut milk (the creamier the better) – about 100ml

frozen/fresh raspberries

100g dessicated coconut

Find a yourself a useful child to line your muffin tin with muffin/cupcake cases and preheat your oven to 180C/160C(fan)/Gas 4 (the lower end of 4).

Put the softened butter (20 secs in the microwave will do it nicely), caster sugar, flour and coconut into the bowl. All together. Using the trusty hand mixer, beat all the ingredients together – with the additional coconut this will be quite a thick mix.

Add the coconut milk/cream a bit at a time until you get the mix to the ‘soft dropping’ consistency. The coconut will absorb some of the moisture when it’s cooked so it can be pretty soft! Get some help to do the mixing (or tolerate your sister having a go).

Take your bowl of raspberries – these are from a frozen mix of berries – it would have been far more sensible to use the pack of frozen raspberries I later found at the bottom of the freezer. You need at least one raspberry per cupcake, ideally 2 or 3.

Using your trusty ice-cream scoop ~~dollop~~ gently fill each case to about ¾ full (two thirds is just as good). Then push raspberries into the top of the mix. We put ours into the middle of each cake but you could spread them around the top. It’s probably best not to put them too close to the edge as they’ll stick to the case and that’s just a waste!

Bake for 20-25 minutes. I know I always say this, but I don’t know what your oven is like. They need to look like this when they come out the oven:

Leave to cool.

In the meantime, you can make some coconut icing – if that’s what floats your boat with:

150g very soft butter

300g icing sugar

50g dessicated coconut

about 50ml of coconut milk

Beat the butter, sugar and icing sugar together. Don’t set the mixer running too fast because you’ll cover the kitchen with icing sugar. Add the coconut milk a bit at a time until you get it to a smooth, soft butter icing. Pipe/swirl as you so wish.