Coconut Baby Shower Cupcakes

New year, new life.. And one of my friends is having a baby!

So, I decided to make a few little cupcakes for a mini baby shower. She doesn’t know what she’s having, therefore I decided to keep them very neutral, and I wanted a nice plain-coloured cupcake which still packed a lot of flavour.

Everyone knows I LOVE a bit of coconut, and coconut and jam are just best buds in my kitchen, so I did half little coconut cupcakes and half larger coconut muffins with a surprise jammy centre! These turned out sweet, super-duper coconutty and utterly gorgeous. I will make these a lot more.

Packaged up for transport!

Sidebar: because I am great at planning my life, the battery to my camera failed at the very end of this recipe, so the last few photos are courtesy of my nexus 5.

Makes 9-12 depending on the size you do

Ingredients for the cakes

• 125ml coconut milk
• 80ml oil
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar
• 200g flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 100g caster sugar
• 45g desiccated coconut
• 1-2 tbsp milk
• 1-2 tbsp strawberry jam, optional

Ingredients for the Icing

• 25g coconut milk (the solid bit)
• 25g butter
• 220g icing sugar
• Food colouring and sprinkles, as desired

Method

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius.

Mix together the coconut milk, oil and egg in a bowl.

In another bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, caster sugar and vanilla sugar. Add the wet to the dry ingredients, and mix well. 

Throw in the desiccated coconut and mix together. Add milk at the end if needed to get a smooth dropping consistency.

Now, prepare a muffin pan with cupcake or muffin wrappers.

If you’re making the jammy ones, spoon about 1 tbsp of mix into a wrapper, then dollop 1tsp of the jam, and then cover with another spoon of mixture until the jam is well covered. If you’re making them without jam then just fill the wrappers 2/3 full as normal.

Bake in the oven for 25 minutes, or until golden on top.

Let cool on a rack.

For the icing, mix the butter and coconut milk. Stir in the icing sugar until you have a nice pipe able mixture. Add some food colouring if desired, I went with a pale lilac which came out a little bit on the grey side. Hey, grey is still neutral!

When completely cool, ice your buns and decorate as needed! I had fun with some little sugar letters I had around.