Put the Lime in the Coconut and Eat 'em All Up...

I'm going to hear poetry readings Saturday at Paragraph's On Padre Blvd.... one of the events in the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival.  I went last year and really enjoyed the readings.  The teen and I will be on the island anyway getting him a haircut from Sharla at Venus Nails and Spa...and ordering wrist corsages (yes, that is plural) for his dates to Prom (it's a long story for another time - they're going as friends).  Anyway, he's into poetry, because when he hears or reads poetry...he tends to want to put it to music.  I told him I wanted to go over to Paragraphs for their second session, and he said he wouldn't mind joining me.  Sounds like a nice afternoon.

Now, when I go visit Joni and Griff, the most awesome booksellers on the planet, I feel an unremitting urge to take treats with me.  I've been staying out of the kitchen this week due to my abundant baking last week, so I really wasn't prepared nor in a planning state of mind.  I'd been idly catching up on my food magazines this afternoon after finishing work and I recalled I'd seen an interesting and simple cake called a French Yogurt Cake.  I grabbed the Bon Appetit that I'd been perusing and flipped through until I found it.  It was a recipe with lemon...and I had one lemon....and I had Greek yogurt and I had everything else required...pretty basic cake.  It called for a tablespoon of fine lemon zest and I only had one lemon...but I had a lime.  I figured I could add the two together and that would work.  I, of course, wanted petite bites for the bookstore visitors, so I decided I could do mini cupcakes with this batter.  I wasn't sure what to do for a topping - the cake in the magazine was just a loaf cake - no glaze or anything.  Huh, well, I could figure that out later.  It was 7:30 on a Friday night and I wanted to get these baked off so I headed to the kitchen.

Now, I have to tell you, I have not made a cake by hand in quite a while.  I use a stand mixer most all the time!  This recipe, however, called for hand whisking of the wet stuff and folding in of the dry stuff.  It was rather relaxing I must say.

I also substituted 1 teaspoon of vanilla bean paste instead of the 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract called for...and my Greek yogurt turned out to be fat free, which I didn't notice until I was throwing the container away and the cupcakes were in the oven.  *Shrug* - nothing to be done about it at this point.  Hoped they'd be okay.

Here's the recipe, slightly modified as described.  The article was written by Andrew Knowlton and he said "it was often the first dessert French children learn to prepare".  It sounds delicious so thanks for sharing that recipe Bon Appetit!

French Yogurt Mini Cupcakes
Adapted from Bon Appetit's French Yogurt Cake
May 2012 Issue, Page 30

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1 cup white granulated sugar
Zest from one lemon and one lime (1 Tbsp approx.)
   using a micro plane for a very fine zest

3/4 cup fat-free Greek yogurt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Line mini cupcake pans with paper liners (I got about 32 cupcakes from the recipe)

In a 2 cup mixing cup, measure the flour, baking powder, and kosher salt together.
Whisk until well blended.  Set aside.

In a medium mixing bowl, combine sugar and zest from both lemon and lime.  With fingers of both hands, rub the sugar and zest together until sugar is moist and you can see flecks of zest evenly distributed throughout the sugar.

To the sugar mixture, add Greek yogurt, vegetable oil, eggs, and vanilla bean paste.  Manually whisk to blend.

Fold in dry ingredients just to blend.  The batter will be quite thick.

I used a small cookie dough scoop and loaded one scoop into each cupcake liner.
Bake until top of cupcakes are golden and a tester inserted into center comes out clean.  This took 21-22 minutes for me.  I started checking at 20 minutes and they were almost perfect - and I let them go just a couple minutes longer to get a bit more golden.  The toothpick came out clean. 

While I typed this I found myself singing Put the Lime in the Coconut and thought - HEY, maybe a lemon/lime fluffy frosting (using the juice from the nekkid lemon and lime) and some coconut added in?  Or on top?  I don't know.  I guess you will have figured out the answer to that question when you looked at the blog because I know there will be a photo on top!

I also sampled a hot-out-of-the-oven cupcake.  Oh MY!  These could indeed be eaten plain.  They are not overly citrusy - but I can taste both the lime and the lemon.  These are awesome!!!  I do believe they would have been even more awesome with whole milk yogurt...but these are none to shabby that's for sure.

Here's what I finally did for the frosting...

Lime in the Coconut Frosting

Ingredients:

4 ounces butter, softened
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
16 ounces powdered sugar (confectioners sugar)
2 tablespoons juice from one lime and one lemon squeezed
   into a bowl over a strainer  - there will be leftover juice.
6 ounces sweetened shredded coconut
1 drop Wilton Leaf Green gel paste

Method:

Beat butter and cream cheese until incorporated and fluffy.  Add vanilla bean paste and mix until incorporated.  Add 1/2 of the powdered sugar, mix well, and add the remaining powdered sugar and mix until you have a lumpy mixture.
Add juice one tablespoon at a time and mix thoroughly after each addition.  Frosting will have smoothed out at this point - if not, add juice a tiny bit at a time until "just right".
Add coconut and whip for 30 seconds on medium high.
I added a drop of leaf green gel paste - to get the "lime" concept obvious to the oblivious :-)
Whip to incorporate color evenly.

I chose to pipe the frosting - but it was not easy with the coconut in the frosting.  It was difficult to get the frosting to exit the tip smoothly from start to finish.  I couldn't get the center point to release because the coconut was stringy in the tip...and I was quite off kilter in my piping as I struggled for even coverage.  If I do this again, I'd probably just frost them with an offset spatula.

I did, of course, have one as a quality control check.  Pretty darn delicious I must say.  The slight tartness of the cream cheese and citrus juices balanced out the sweetness of the confectioner's sugar.  The cupcakes themselves were mildly citrus and it really worked nicely together.

Those cupcakes would also be good with a lemon or lime glaze...guess I'll have to make them again sometime and give that a whirl!

Bon Appetit, Y'all!

Shared With:

The Rio Star Grapefruit

There is nothing more decadent in the world of Texas fruit than a juicy ripe Rio Star grapefruit in the month of January.  IMHO of course.  The smell, the taste, the richness of color...it has it all.  I know I'm prejudiced, being a native Texan, but it is truly a glorious fruit.  I learned to like grapefruit from the time I spent the night with a friend as a young girl.  Her mom was serving grapefruit halves for breakfast...and I, being as picky of an eater as my oh-so-picky teen, declined saying I didn't like them, they were too tart.  This coming from a girl who would cut a lemon in quarters and eat them for a snack.  My little friend's momma just smiled and spooned sugar all over the top and said "try this"...and it was the beginning of a long and wonderful love affair with the grapefruit...Ruby Reds, Rio Stars...the gloriously rich coral pigments of a beautiful ripe grapefruit.  Oh my, I could wax on and on about it. 

THEN, we came to Donna, Texas to visit my Grandmother for the first time in my young memory.  My Daddy sent us out to the grapefruit trees growing in the yard and said "go eat some grapefruit".  There were all of those delicious grapefruit hanging at eye level of a little girl...but how to peel them?  Where's the sugar?  Someone, I can't recall who but probably my Dad, ripped the skin right off them and handed each of us girls a grapefruit.  We separated the segments and went to town on those grapefruits...we were coated with sticky sweet tart juice and I ate so many I remember feeling queasy.  No need for sugar on those sweetly tart things!  Donna, Texas...in the Rio Grande Valley, just a hop, skip, and a jump from my current home...where I fell in LOVE with the jewel of the winter fruit season.

This morning I decided I would section a couple of the Rio Stars sitting in my fruit basket (I like them room temperature for the best flavor) and have them for dessert after my lunchtime sandwich.  I wasn't thinking about writing a blog until I started the process of sectioning them.  I only learned to do it a few years ago...and now I never peel a grapefruit. 

I used to try to cut the peel, I used a spoon to get under the peel, I cut a grapefruit in half and scooped out the flesh with a spoon, I dug under the peel with my fingernails and ate the segments like oranges...they were always a lot of work.  On top of all that work, there was usually pith still on the fruit...and it just doesn't taste good...it's bitter; until I learned to section them, that is.  Now, I get a glorious bowl of cleanly sectioned grapefruit with minimal fuss and muss.  When I'm finished, I pour the juice from the cutting board into the bowl and I have a bowl of fresh goodness, slurping the juice straight from the bowl when I'm finished...bad manners, but good stuff...so I do it, bad manners aside.  It makes me salivate just thinking about it...because of course, I sat down to type up this post before eating my bowl of grapefruit sections.  However, I know it is sitting there waiting for me whenever I'm finished.  It's like the carrot in front of the plow mule...hurry up and get finished and I'll get my reward.

I wondered if folks realized how easy it was to section a grapefruit...and if not, I figured I could take enough photos to demonstrate.  So, here goes...

Use a very sharp knife on a sturdy cutting board.  Cut off both ends of the grapefruit.

Set the grapefruit on one of the flat ends and slice around the curve of the fruit, removing the skin and the white pith.

Clean up any pithy spots you missed, turning it over to see both ends. 

Lay the grapefruit on its side to begin the sectioning process.

Insert your knife between the membrane and the pulp, as close as you can get and slice in until you feel the center of the fruit, remove your knife and place it on the other side of the section, slicing down again until you feel the center.  Remove the first segment.

Move to the inner edge of the next segment and, again, slice down to the center of the fruit...but this time, pivot your knife to the right, sliding it to underside of the far side of the segment...you can feel it.

And just repeat all the way around :-)  Here I am on the last segment of this grapefruit.

You end up with this....beautiful, juicy segments of Rio Star heaven!!!  Be careful - don't cut yourself.  Once you get the hang of it, you will never go back to eating these juicy citrus nuggets any other way!

Bon Appetit, Y'all!!!