Coconut Cream Cupcakes

I was looking for a better coconut cake recipe that was definitely coconutty but didn’t taste like you were eating SPF32! I love the scratch WASC recipe by Edencakes so I used that as a base for experimenting and came up with this version that has a fine, soft crumb and a mellow coconut taste. I have tried several coconut milk coconut cakes but I found that using Cream of Coconut (I used Coco Lopez) gives a more intense yet still natural coconut flavor. I cut back the sugar in the original recipe by a cup because Cream of Coconut has a lot of sugar and I used all butter because that’s what I bake with. I also added an additional egg for stability since much of the binding qualities of the milk were replaced by the cream of coconut.
You can cut this recipe in half if you don’t have a 6 quart or larger mixer. The full recipe yields about 48 normal sized cupcakes or 36 jumbo sized. Haven’t tried it as full cakes yet, but I’ll bet it would be fine. I fill mine with pastry cream and top with cream cheese frosting. Bon Apetit!

Hmmm…just enough Coco Lopez left for a Pina Colada!