CAUTION: The following post contains “bear” nudity. I recommend skipping this one if you’re easily offended.
Now that those prudes have left the page, for the rest of you, on with the post!
This month for bookclub was our annual “beach read” book, so we were reading Summer Girls by Mary Alice Monroe. Loving a theme of any kind where baking is concerned, I decided to get fully into the spirit of it and thus made these Pineapple coconut “Beach Read” beauties…
I must admit, it’s amazing the things you accidentally discover are vegan when you’re trying to be all creative (fruit rollups are gelatin free! Not that I find them that good or tasty to be honest, and I think the ones I bought seemed to have hardened to the point where they couldn’t in all truthfulness be unrolled, and so I renamed them “fruit breaks into pieces”. Not as catchy a name I realize, but much more accurate).
Full disclosure however: I’m vegan, but I don’t have any issues with honey. If you do, then I would recommend NOT using the honey flavoured Teddy Grahams, and also using a vegan brand of graham cracker crumbs.
Now, with that legal disclaimer out of the way 😉 – on to the actual cupcakes! I swear in the future I’ll actually start posting recipes and links to sites where I’ve gotten inspiration, but for now, you’ll just have to make due with my extreme laziness.
For the cupcakes, I used a vanilla cupcake recipe that I thoroughly enjoy, but added some pineapple and coconut (adjusting liquid and dry ratios accordingly. It’s a good thing you’re not getting the recipe from me at this point since I just kind of eye-balled it until I thought the consistency looked right. Hmmm…unless I could put that in as a new form of measurement? “toss in your eye-balled amount of pineapple and stir vigorously” 😉 ).
The icing is a basic “cream cheese” icing to which I added a little pineapple juice to amp up the flavour. The sand is made of a mix of brown sugar and graham cracker crumbs. “Towels” are fruit rollups and of course there’s the Teddy Graham sunbather (because I don’t know about you, but I’m ALWAYS seeing bears just chillaxin’ at the beach ). Those beach “stones” on the plate are chocolate rocks.
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