Semi-Homemade Cupcakes

When you want a homemade dessert for your family or friends, semi homemade cupcakes are just the perfect choice. Learn about semi homemade cupcakes with help from a two-time winner of Food Network's Cupcake Wars in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Arleen from Sweet Arleen's here in West Side Village, California. And today I have with me my executive pastry chef, Julia. Hi. When you are running short on time but you really want a homemade dessert for your family or friends semi homemade cupcakes are just the perfect choice. Don't you think Julia? Absolutely and it's a great way to capture homemade but not all the steps. Okay so we're going to show you one recipe that we've chosen which is a coconut lemon cupcake. And it starts with a just a box of any brand classic yellow cake mix. We are also going to use pudding and pie filling, in this case it's lemon to get the lemon flavor. And that's just the powder not prepared. Great. Thank you. And we're going to also add a little lemon dye to that, a little food coloring to it just to give it a little bit more of a lemon color. So this recipe is extremely easy. We are going to mix all of our cake ingredients together. We would typically start with a classic yellow cake mix. We would add the additional pudding and pie mix. That is again a instant pudding and pie mix using lemon. We would add our oil, our vegetable oil, our coconut milk to give it that coconut flavor, three eggs in this case. And again a little bit of lemon dye to that, food coloring to that if you choose. Once that's all mixed you are going to bake it, normal cupcakes typically take about 20-22 minutes in a 350 degree oven. And your lemon coconut semi homemade cupcakes are going to look like this. Yeah. So they are beautiful. Now in this recipe we've also chosen to use a little addition to some store bought icing. And in this case Julia I picked up the whipped cream icing. I thought it would be a nice balance. And we can add a little coconut extract to this. Right folding those two together will create a little bit special of a icing. And then that can be treated just like any icing to ice the actual cupcakes. Now the look that we are going for here is going to be a combination of toasted coconut and not toasted coconut. Okay. And we use unsweetened coconut but you can use sweetened since it's a little easier to find. So go ahead and dump that right on top. Okay. And just swirl it around. Alright. And then as soon as I ice these we are going to kind of roll it in there like we do our coconut snowball. Okay sounds good. You ready? That's a great mixture. Yeah and then with a very light hand. You don't want to push hard here. You're just going to kind of dab it in. Make sure you get all the spots. And boom. How's that? It looks beautiful Julia. If you want a variation you can just kind of ice it like we do here with our classic three tip swirl. And then just sprinkle it on top. Yeah. Okay. It's a little less. Great. Well these look like they are homemade but they are actually semi homemade here with Arleen and Julia at Sweet Arleen's. Thank you for joining us and enjoy.