MSC: Coconut Cupcakes...or...Yellow Buttermilk Cupcakes with Dark Chocolate Frosting

Yikes. I so don't eat coconut. No offense intended, Jennifer from Cinema Cupcakes, our recipe selector for the month! The look of it totally creeps me out, and I'm not a fan of the taste either. When I first saw this on the list for this month, I thought, well, there's one cupcake I'm skipping. I hope I don't get kicked out! Then, I re-thought the situation, and realized that maybe I could make some creative substitutions and still participate. Perhaps I could make something really awesome by being creative.

Apparently I forgot that I'm me and my creativity in the kitchen tends to lead to disasters of epic proportions. Like when my friend Erin and I were 10 and decided that chocolate water was an awesome idea. Hershey's natural cocoa powder plus water, it had to be awesome...or not. So after coming up with a grand plan to make a white cake cupcake and decorate it with shavings of white chocolate that looked like coconut, I realized that there was absolutely no way I had time for something so labor intensive this month...so I made Martha's Yellow Buttermilk Cupcakes with Dark Chocolate Frosting instead. Yum! I had an ulterior motive for making these - I plan to bake some yellow cupcakes for Baby's 2nd birthday next month, and I'm searching for the perfect recipe. This wasn't it.

Don't get me wrong, they were yummy, but I didn't love the consistency of the frosting, nor did I really love the cupcake itself. The cupcake was a little bland, actually. I was quite disappointed. I have a feeling I'll be sticking with the America's Test Kitchen baking book recipe that I've had before, though I haven't posted it in the past. It's definitely much more flavorful and moist than this cupcake. Sorry Martha, this was one wasn't a hit for me! But it was pretty...