Coconut Caramel Snowballs

This month the Daring Baker’s head back to the world of sugar. Our hosts Dolores, Alex, and Jenny turn our attentions to cake, caramel, and butter: the Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting courtesy of Shuna Fish Lydon, as published on Bay Area Bites.

As usual, I’ve taken a few creative liberties and created something a bit more unique, a twist on a snack cake, a Coconut Caramel Snowball. For those of you that didn’t grow up with this Hostess treat, a Snowball is a shortbread base with a semi-marshmallow semi-sphere on top, covered in chocolate and coconut. For my version of the treat I decided to use a semi-sphere of caramel cake, covered in caramel frosting and coconut. As an added bonus, I hollowed out the inside of the spheres, filled them with frosting and a chewy coconut caramel, and closed up the bottom of the cake.

So how was the recipe? I thought it was pretty good. The recipe was broken into several components: cake, frosting, clear caramel, and chewy caramel. The cake goes together very easily and would be great unfilled, just served with a little butter and tea. The caramels are also a great starting point for all things caramel; you can add variety of ingredients in order to change up the flavors: salt, coconut, lavendar, orange, or anything else you desire. The frosting is almost pure butter. The only thing that would make this difficult is if you had to make it without power tools :).

I changed up the optional caramel recipe a little bit. Since these were coconut caramel cakes, I thought I would make coconut caramels. I replaced half of the cream with coconut milk and added a little bit of creamed coconut in place of some of the butter. The caramels have a burnt sugar, hint of coconut flavor, which are not at all sweet. The paired very well with the sweet frosting and rich cake. I had so many leftover caramels that I wrapped them up for later enjoyment.

Unfortunately I missed the posting date…again. This may or may not count, but either way, the cakes were great and I don’t regret finally showing them off.

Tags: caramel, coconut, daring bakers, pastries
Posted in pastry | 5 Comments »

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