Tropical Traditions provided me with a free sample of this product to review, and I was under no obligation to review it unless I so chose. Nor was I under any obligation to write a positive review or sponsor a product giveaway in return for the free product.

When I stumbled across this recipe for coconut flour cupcakes a few months ago, I thought it would be great for Michael’s birthday.  He loves coconut.  And the recipe just happens to be gluten-free, so I can eat it, too.  (Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture after removing the cupcakes from the pan.  It ended up being one of those evenings and it was all I could do to get everything on the table in the same night!)

This was a perfect opportunity to use the coconut flour Tropical Traditions provided me with.

I got the coconut flour several months ago, and had been experimenting with it, but I found that it has a bit of a learning curve.  It behaves very differently than “regular” flours, absorbing a lot more liquid.  Consequently, recipes that rely on it use other things as to add additional bulk.  Many of them rely heavily on eggs, as eggs add both liquid and bulk.  This gives them a distinctly eggy/spongey texture.  (The waffles I tried made a very thick batter that oozed out of the waffle maker.)

(The waffle batter looked quite a bit like this cupcake batter, actually.)

These cupcakes had that same spongey texture and most of my family wasn’t really crazy about it.  I think it would be fine if they just weren’t expecting “cupcakes.”  In other words, they tasted pretty good; they just weren’t anything like the cupcakes we’re used to, so they might have been better as, say, breakfast muffins.

Surprisingly, they didn’t taste like coconut.  The recipe uses coconut flour, coconut oil (and ours was extra virgin, which tastes coconutty to me, in most applications), and coconut milk.  I expected the results to taste like coconut, but they didn’t.  For my purposes, this was a bit of a bummer.  (I chose them specifically because hubby likes coconut.)  For general purposes, though, it’s a good thing – they’re very neutral.

I made the recipe exactly as directed, using the upper stevia range and omitting the (optional) erithrytol.  (We don’t intentionally consume sugar alcohols.)  I did double the recipe so it would fill a whole muffin pan.

(It seemed that much of the oil seeped out of them and “slimed” the outside of the cupcake liners – which is pretty amazing considering they’re silicone!)  And then I frosted them with this frosting.  (The frosting was a hit.)

Try This at Home

Would you like to try it for yourself?  Enter to win your own coconut flour for experimenting!  Be sure to give the Rafflecopter widget time to load.  These tips from Tropical Traditions should help as you learn how coconut flour works.  (Want to know more about how to use coconut oil?  Read this.)

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