Overall, I didn't find much pina colada about these pina colada cupcakes.
The recipe calls for cake flour and usually I just look up how I can substitute all purpose flour, but I had to go to the supermarket anyway for the crushed pineapple and figured I'd look. I found pastry flour...but it was whole wheat...but figured it would be a good idea to follow the recipe as closely as possible, so i got the whole wheat pastry flour.
As I'm whipping up my cupcakes with my whole wheat pastry flour and it just looks weird! It tasted okay but I was skeptical.
I used free-standing foil cupcake cups since I had so much batter. Here is the whole wheat pastry flour cupcake before it was baked. I can't say I thought it was that appetizing but I pressed on seeing how they'd bake up.
Also the recipe calls for only a 1/3 cup of well drained crushed pineapple. After seeing how much batter this yielded I had serious doubts about their pineappleness, in the end I was right.
Here they are all baked up! The whole wheat flour made their coloring a bit off from usual cupcakes, but they were nice and spongey and tasty none the less! There is definitely a whole wheat texture to them, different, but good!
So on to the frosting. I do not own a candy thermometer and things like "when syrup reaches firm ball stage" are just too complicated for me, I have to knowledge of such stages so how would i recognize them anyway? :op I googled this recipe for vanilla spiced rum frosting.
I liked how it came out very much! although I did leave out the vanilla and double the rum in hopes of saving the pina colada-ness of it. Didn't really work and I can't say the flavor of the spiced rum really came out either, but it was good either way! I should of doubled it or even double plus half to frost all of these though if I wanted to pipe them all. I thought of garnishing with some shredded coconut to salvage the pina coladaness, but I didn't have any and had already put in a lot of effort with these cupcakes! I wasn't going to the store again. :op
I broke out my sweet cake decorating set to pipe the frosting. More fun with piping frosting is on my flickr page.
This is the plate I saved for myself. They went over really well at the party though! More of the cupcakes ready to travel on flickr again.
I wanted to bring some to my parents so I made some virgin pina colada cupcakes where I just threw some crushed pineapple in the frosting, but again, you couldn't really taste it. I needed to get more mileage out of the frosting towards the end so I iced these with a knife. And colored it blue so I'd remember which were the virgin ones, haha.
So overall, I was mad I did all that work and in the end I had no pina colada cupcakes. Although they did turn out yummy and everyone was impressed! I will have to continue searching for a pina colada cupcake that tastes like pina colada. Open to suggestions!
