Making the Homemade Cool Whip for BravetTart's Homemade Twinkies was so time consuming that there was no way I was going to waste any of it. The Twinkies only required a half batch of the Cool Whip, so I decided to use the remainder to fill a batch of BraveTart's Homemade Hostess-Style Cupcakes. I've actually been making homemade Hostess cupcakes for years, using a recipe I tore out from an issue of Food & Wine at the hair salon fifteen years ago. I've been quite happy with that recipe, so if I didn't already have the Cool Whip handy, I might not have tried Stella's recipe.
Aside from the hassle of making the Cool Whip filling, Stella's chocolate cupcakes are straightforward. You sift flour with Dutch-process cocoa powder and whisk in sugar, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, cold eggs, vanilla, and melted coconut oil. I used a mix of virgin and refined coconut oil because I didn't have enough refined oil for the recipe. You pour the batter into paper-lined cupcake tins and bake; the recipe makes two dozen cupcakes.
The Hostess cupcake recipe I make from Food & Wine instructs you to fill the cupcakes from the bottom using a piping bag, so I've always baked those in greased tins without cupcake liners. By contrast, this recipe has you fill the cupcakes from the top, so you can use liners, which means less hassle and mess. You're supposed to use a small cookie cutter to remove a core of cake from each cupcake, but I had trouble removing the cake cores intact. So I pulled out my cupcake corer (I own this one), which is honestly one of the most useful single-purpose kitchen gadgets I own. The serrated edge cuts through cake effortlessly, the cores pull out easily, and the plunger makes it a snap to eject the cake cores. Once I had removed the cores, it was easy to fill the centers with homemade Cool Whip from a piping bag, and I sealed in the filling with a small cylinder of cake that I cut from each core.
The cupcakes are topped with a ganache-like frosting made from heavy cream, dark chocolate, and a little corn syrup. I spread it on top of the filled cupcakes, chilled the cupcakes briefly to set the topping, and then drew on the squiggle with a mixture of powdered sugar and heavy cream.
I loved these cupcakes. The chocolate cake was flavorful and moist, and they had a generous amount of the delicious homemade Cool Whip. I could detect a slight coconut flavor from the virgin coconut oil, but it was subtle. Even though I like coconut, I think that refined oil is the way to go for this recipe, so that there's nothing to distract from the chocolate. Filling the cupcakes from the top after removing a core is not just easier and neater than filling them from the bottom with a piping bag, but it produces better results, since you can get more filling in the cupcake. I will definitely use the top-filling method when I make the Food & Wine cupcakes in the future. I would need to do a head-to-head taste test -- with both cupcakes filled using the same method -- between this recipe and the Food & Wine one to decide which one I like better. But I thought these just were delightful.
Recipes: "Homemade Hostess-Style Cupcakes" and "Homemade Cool Whip [variation of Vanilla Marshmallow Creme]" from BraveTart by Stella Parks.
Previous Post: "A Childhood Treat from a Purloined Page [Chocolate Cupcakes with Cream Filling]," September 7, 2008.
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