Coconut Snowball Cupcakes

Nobody loves a coconut cake like my family. My grandma always made them for birthdays…and random days. My mom brought home a Better Homes and Gardens recently and it had a coconut cake on the cover. When I told her I was needing to bake today, needless to say the magazine was conveniently in my lap soon afterward. The coconut cake is a three-layer cake and it is covered in freshly cracked and shaved coconut. Well, I’m definitely NOT cracking a coconut anytime soon, so isn’t it convenient that a bag of Baker’s coconut just happens to be in the fridge??

I decided that it would be best to make cupcakes instead of a typical three-layer cake, and so I cut the recipe in half and greased up the cupcake pan. Then, I started messing with the recipe and making it my own. I added coconut to the cake batter, cut down on the yolks, adjusted the flavors…I turned a simple butter cake into a light, fluffy coconut cake.

Then I made the frosting. It calls for a basic 7-minute frosting, which I flavored with coconut. I didn’t cut the frosting in half, because (who are we kidding?) the more frosting, the better!
Going along with the “more is better” concept with my frosting, I cut the centers out of the cupcakes and filled them with frosting!

Then after frosting the cakes with a generous amount of frosting, I added another heaping spoonful of frosting on top of each one. (Picture below is before the extra spoonful)

I piled on and patted in a bunch of coconut flakes, and viola: Snowballs!!! Yummmm Plus, there’s frosting to spare because I know my mom likes to dip her cupcakes in more frosting as she eats them.

Love me? I think you do!

I honestly thought I was burned out for life when it comes to coconut cake because of all the servings of it I’ve had in my lifetime…but looking at these, my tolerance has been renewed. Ah, how refreshing!