Chocolate coconut cupcakes

One of the food blogs I enjoy is www.loveandoliveoil.com, written by Lindsay and Taylor. They make tasty food and take good photos of it, which I suppose is a useful quality for food blogging. I make experimental food and usually forget the photo. Hmmm.

I used her recipe for the cupcakes I made for Ed's party. I wanted to make car-bomb cupcakes, but I didn't feel like going out to buy Guinness and eggs and sour cream, all things I didn't happen to have on hand. Her cupcakes are vegan, which means I didn't have to go and buy eggs and milk and stuff, and they use coconut milk, which I had on hand. I used the recipe for the chocolate raspberry truffle cupcakes, minus the whole raspberry bit, and they were delicious and dark and moist and not too sweet, which made them perfect for the Bailey's cream cheese frosting, which is good enough to eat on its own, actually.

I've reprinted the recipe below, in my own words for my own records. I'll be making these cupcakes again, as they were pretty simple to make and tasted quite good. They were also strikingly black, thanks to the special dark baking cocoa, and that made a nice contrast to the white-ish frosting, very pretty.

Chocolate coconut cupcakes
Made 11.5 cupcakes

1C coconut milk (shake the can well before opening)
1/3C oil
1 tsp vanilla
3/4C sugar (I used brown because that was what I had)
1C flour
1/3C Hershey's special dark cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 350F. Mix all the wet ingredients together, and in a separate bowl mix all the dry goods. Mix dry into wet. Stir just to combine. Plop large spoonfuls into lined cupcake tins, and bake for 18-22 minutes. Mine took 19 minutes.

Top with Bailey's cream cheese frosting. It makes any bad day immediately better.