Remember the Hostess SnoBalls of your youth? I used to love those things so when I saw the recipe for Pinkies Chocolate Lunch Box Treats in
The Back In The Day Cookbook I knew I had to try them. I've had the book since Christmas but hadn't gotten a chance to try anything from it yet. I think I baked far too much at Christmas and I was kind of done with cake for a while.
I even had the coconut extract that it required so I was good to go. There are a lot of steps but it's not a hard recipe even though it does take a while. The cupcakes were so good that I'll definitely use that recipe again. I made the icing/filling which is an odd recipe with a cooked milk/flour slurry that you beat into butter and powdered sugar. It does make a nice fluffy icing however I do have one problem. I found that I really, really, really don't like coconut extract. Who knew. I don't think I ever used it before. Also, they call for powdered food coloring which I didn't have but I used regular red liquid food coloring and shook up the coconut in a plastic bag until it was pink. It worked pretty well.
You have to remove the cupcakes from the paper liners and dig out a small hole in the middle for the filling.
Mine weren't all that pretty but that's ok because you cover them in icing and coconut anyway. So you pipe some icing into the holes and then you are supposed to refrigerate them but I didn't because I'm impatient. Then you ice the whole outside (except for the bottom) and dunk them in coconut. Place them nicely in a cute cupcake liner (that you can't see in this picture) and they turn out like this:
They look like what they're supposed to but I couldn't get past the coconut flavoring. Frank and Dylan both liked them but I ended up making some plain vanilla buttercream and filling and icing some with that and topping them with coconut. The cake was delicious and I'll definitely make them again but with just vanilla flavoring. I think the coconut on the outside is enough. Or maybe I just bought a dud bottle of coconut emulsion. It's long gone now.
I'm looking forward to trying something else from this book. During a lovely bout of insomnia last night I reserved four new cookbooks from the library so we'll see how that goes too. I might actually find something else exciting to make.
