Red Velvet Coconut Bars

UPDATE - After Book Club:
I would now substitute a basic chocolate cake mix instead of Red Velvet.  The red from the cake mix got all over fingers, teeth, and tongues.  Since bars are meant to be handled with your fingers, and I saw how intense the red was, I did take forks and plates and lots of napkins.  It was a bit embarrassing to see how overly intense the red was.  Oh well, lesson learned.  It was really tasty though!  Try it with just a chocolate cake mix and it will do fine...although, at Christmas, it might be pretty!
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I am going to my first Book Club meeting Tuesday morning at Paragraph's on Padre and wanted to take a treat to have with coffee.  I found a recipe on Inside BruCrew Life's blog and I wanted to give it a try, but as so often happens, I didn't have all of the ingredients.  Since I'd rather be nibbled to death by ducks than go to the grocery store today, I scanned my pantry shelves.  I went crazy... I just flew by the seat of my pants and hoped it would turn out better than okay...but if it was at least okay, I'd have something to take.  I am a huge fan of Jocelyn at Inside BruCrew Life - she has a plethora of yummy desserts and I have tried several of them... not a bad one in the bunch.  I was very hopeful that my fly-by of one of her desserts would be something she might appreciate.

Here's what I ended up with:

Red Velvet Coconut Bars

Red Velvet Coconut Bars
Inspired by Inside BruCrew Life

Ingredients:

1 Red Velvet cake mix (used Duncan Hines)
6 Tbsp salted butter, melted
1/3 cup Half and Half
1 14oz can Sweetened Condensed Milk (not evaporated milk)
8 ounces Cream Cheese, softened to room temperature
7 ounce bag of Bakers Angel Flake Coconut (sweetened)
6 ounces Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
1 tsp. brewed coffee
1/2 cup heavy cream

Method:

WEAR GLOVES
Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Prepare a 9x13 pan with cooking spray (I used a glass pan because I wanted to see what the layers looked like) .
Combine the cake mix, melted butter, and half and half until crumbly and wet.

Press one half of the dough evenly into the bottom of the pan.  Set the remaining dough to the side. (If you failed to heed my warning to wear gloves - well, you now have red hands)

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the softened cream cheese and sweetened condensed milk until mostly smooth.  Add the coconut and mix on low.
Pour the cream cheese mixture over the dough in the pan and smooth out evenly with a spatula.

Pull and drop bits of the rest of the cake dough over the top of the cream cheese mixture.  The dough is very "doughy" so try to pull small pieces and get them evenly over the top...it will not provide full coverage.  That's okay.

Bake at 350 degrees 28-30 minutes.  There was still a bit of jiggle in the middle when it came out.  That's okay too. It firms up when cooled.  The edges are lightly browned.  Place pan on rack and allow to cool completely.

Place chocolate chips in a heat resistant mixing bowl and add one teaspoon of brewed coffee.  In a small saucepan, bring the whipping cream just to a slight boil, stirring the entire time.  Remove immediately from the heat as it reaches a boil and pour the hot cream over the chocolate chips.  Stir until mixture is creamy and richly chocolate!  You have ganache....yum.

Spread thinly over the top of the bars.  Let set completely before cutting into squares.

The "red" part of the Red Velvet is quite messy and impossible
to cut without getting color on the white portion.
Regardless, they are delicious!
 

Bon Appetit, Y'all!!!

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!

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CHOCOLATE MACAROON CUPCAKES

I've been hankering for a chocolate cupcake or cake recipe with a coconut filling.  One that reminds me of the boxed cake my Mom used to make back in the 60's or 70's when Bundt pans sort of "came into fashion".  I read that a 2nd place winner in a 60's era Pillsbury Bake-off was a Bundt cake ...and thus the fashion began.  I remember my Mom making the chocolate one with a tunnel of coconut cake in the middle and a lovely vanilla glaze over the top.  I thought it was the height of "wowness" back in the day.  It tasted really wonderful!

I've browsed the online recipe catalogs without much success, and then when I was making the Marble Cheesecake a few weeks back, on the same page of "clipped recipes" from the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, I saw I had saved a recipe titled "Judith's Chocolate Macaroon Cupcakes".  I'd never made them but decided today would be the day.  I must have had this recipe since the 1980s or so...maybe even longer...although the newspaper wasn't quite as yellowed as the one from 1974 :-)

I just had the first "taster" cupcake, sans glaze...oh my goodness...that's a dang good cupcake!

I was worried because the recipe appears to be "low fat" - egg whites and applesauce - no butter - very little of the fat-laden yummies I usually include in my baked goods.  I did make two small changes...and they obviously turned out well.  I used whole eggs in the chocolate part of the cupcake and I used my own homemade Ricotta cheese...and it was not fat-free as called for in the recipe.  It was, however, made just with 2% milk instead of the usual cream and whole milk - so we'll call it low fat.

This does not taste like a cupcake where I skimped on the good stuff.  It is quite delicious.

Here's the way I did it:

CHOCOLATE MACAROON CUPCAKES

Filling:

1 cup low-fat ricotta cheese
1 egg white
1/4 cup granulated white sugar
1/3 cup sweetened shredded coconut (I wish I had chopped this a bit - I think it would have made the center a bit more cohesive)
1 teaspoon coconut extract

Cupcakes:

1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated white sugar
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I used Hershey's)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup low-fat buttermilk
1/2 cup applesauce (I used one of Mott's single serve 3.9 ounce containers)
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

18 cupcake liners
Non-stick vegetable spray

Glaze:

1 cup sifted confectioner's sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons Half and Half (Just enough liquid to make a thick glaze)

Preliminaries:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Line muffin tins with 18 paper cupcake liners and lightly spray with non-stick vegetable spray.

Method:

Filling:  Combine ricotta cheese, egg white and sugar in a medium bowl.  Stir to combine.  Add coconut and coconut extract.  Stir to combine and set aside.

Cupcake Batter:  Combine flour, sugar, cocoa powder, and soda in the bowl of a stand mixer with paddle attachment.  On low, mix the dry goods gently.
In a small bowl or 2 cup mixing cup with spout (that's what I used), combine buttermilk, applesauce, 2 eggs, and vanilla extract.  Whisk to thoroughly combine.
Turn mixer on low and add wet goods in a thin stream into the flour mixture, beating on low until smooth.

Putting it Together:
Spoon batter into prepared liners - about 1/3 of the liner will be filled.  Top each with 1 tablespoon of filling.   Try not to touch the sides - keep the filling in the center of the cupcake batter.  I used a small cookie dough scoop that has a 1 tbsp volume. 

Spoon remaining batter mixture over filling. 

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes (25 was perfect for me) or until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Allow to cool in pan for 5-10 minutes and then remove to a rack for complete cooling.
Once cooled - mix the glaze and put in a pastry bag or a Ziploc bag, snipping the end, drizzle the cupcakes.

That part wasn't in her recipe.  I wanted the drizzle the way the memory was stored in my brain.

This is a great cupcake, even without the glaze, especially for those who don't want an overly sweet chocolate cake and enjoy a surprise inside.  With the glaze - it was almost exactly the way I remembered the Bundt cake!  YAY!

My next trial will be doubling this and making a Bundt cake ... I'll let you know how that works!  It's a really thin batter, so I'm thinking about maybe using another chocolate cake batter and using this filling.  It was just perfect for cupcakes though ...but, as I said above, I would have liked smaller pieces of coconut in the filling.  So, we'll see....

Bon Appetit, Y'all!!!



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