Coconut Chick Cupcakes

Coconut Chick Cupcakes

These cuties can be made with any type of cake, to be honest, so use your favorite flavor! You just want to make sure it's something with a firm, sturdy texture that will stand up to be unwrapped, flipped over, and decorated.

Cupcakes:
3 cups flour
1 tbsp baking powder
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
1 tbsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Sift together flour and baking powder. In another bowl, beat butter and sugar until fluffy. Add in eggs, one at a time. Add in flour mixture and buttermilk in alternating batches. When everything is well mixed together, beat in vanilla.

Line your cupcake tin with plain paper or foil wrappers. Since you will be discarding them, make sure they're not pretty ones you like. Fill each cup about 3/4 of the way, although you can vary the amount you put in each cup to create different sized chicks.

Bake 10 minutes, turn, bake 10 minutes. Let cool.

Makes 22.

Icing:
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
2 cups xxx sugar
Vanilla

Beat butter until soft. Sift in sugar, and beat, adding in vanilla as needed, until frosting is creamy and spreadable.

Toasted Coconut:
Take about one big package of sweetened shredded coconut and spread it about 1/2 inch thick in a 9x11 baking dish. Preheat the oven to 350 F. Stick the dish in, and let the coconut toast, stirring about every 2-3 minutes. You'll know when it's done because it will be lightly browned and sort of crispy. This can take a while, depending on how thickly you have the coconut in the baking dish.

Decorating:
Icing
Toasted coconut
Red jellybeans
Marzipan, dyed yellow (large amount) and black (smaller amount)

Form small beaks and feet out of the yellow marzipan. My sister, who is a genius at marzipan sculpting, did the honors for this, and she is pictured here in triumph. You will want to make the beaks and feet ahead of time because the icing sets up fairly quickly and you want to be able to stick them on while it's still soft and adhesive.

Remove each cupcake from its wrapper and turn it upside down.

Ice it everywhere except the side that it stands on.

Using a serrated knife, slice the jelly beans in halves to make a comb on the head.

Gently push a beak into the icing,

 then take cupcake to the dish of coconut. Using your hands, pat coconut onto the sides until the chick is coated and looks fluffy.

Then put the feet on the plate and set the chick down on top of them.

Use a little extra icing to adhere the eyes (little balls of black marzipan). Voila!

These are super fun cupcakes and people get very excited about how cute they are. If you are not a fan of marzipan, you can try using almonds for the beaks and pushing tiny pieces of black licorice lace into the icing for eyes. Mix it up! There are no rules about what candy you need to use for decoration, so pick stuff you like.

If you toast the coconut ahead of time, instead of doing it at the last moment (as I did) the process will go a lot faster, too.

Adapted from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes.