Pina Colada Cupcakes (video)
This was a fun video to make – I knew I was making something with the vanilla cupcake base, a can of crushed pineapple, a bunch of shredded coconut, and some spiced rum. I left it up to the viewers to tell me where I was putting the 3 things, and worked out the adjustments to the base recipe.
We went with pineapple-rum cupcakes, and coconut frosting. I had a flash of inspiration and toasted some shredded coconut to put on top of everything, and I added some rum to the frosting, so I needed to add more icing sugar to account for the extra liquid.
I need to watch the video to transcribe the recipe – yes I really did make all the adjustments on the fly, and yes, it really was that simple.
I drained the can of crushed pineapple, and set aside 1/2 cup of juice to swap out for the 1/2 cup of buttermilk. I figured the acidity of the pineapple juice would be close enough to the acidity of the buttermilk, and would help with the second activation of the baking power. Adding some dampish fruit does not require any adjustments, dried fruit should be re-hydrated with water or any other liquid you want, as long as you’re confident the fruit isn’t going to fall apart and leave a puddle of liquid in the batter.
I arbitrarily decided that half a cup of crushed pineapple was the perfect amount, and put it in a non-stick pan and brought it up to medium heat. I added the leftover syrup from the can. I gently boiled off the liquid and started to caramelize the pineapple, added 1/3 cup of spiced rum, which filled my kitchen with the most amazing smell of pineapple and rum. I decided it wasn’t perfect enough, and another 1/3 cup was needed just so I could set the whole thing on fire. As fun as it looks, don’t try this at home – just letting the alcohol in the rum cook off at medium temperature for a minute is sufficient to get rid of all the alcohol, and avoid that sharp boozy mouth-feel.
The frosting was my normal cream cheese buttercream frosting, except I added 1/2 cup of shredded coconut, and I dry-roasted about 1/3 of a cup in a non-stick pan on the stove on medium heat.
Because the frosting was perfect, I decided to push my luck by adding a tablespoon of spiced rum, which required another 1/2 cup of icing sugar, and then another 2 tablespoons of icing sugar to bring it all to the right consistency. I could have just kept beating the frosting, but who’s got time for that? I took a spoonful of frosting, turned it upside down, where I discovered something that defied gravity, so I was happy with the consistency of the final result. I found out later that the flavour of the rum did not come through, and I suspect I’d need about 1/4 cup of rum in the frosting, which would require approximately 2 cups of icing sugar, and at that point, I should work out a booze frosting from scratch and replace some of the butter with rum.
I let the cupcakes rest in the muffin pan for closer to 8 minutes, moved them to a wire rack for about 35 minutes, at which point they were at room temperature. I didn’t think that I’d be able to pipe anything particularly impressive, so I settled on a big dollop of frosting, and sprinkled some of the toasted coconut on top.
