Easter Sunday Birthday Bash

How was everyone's Easter? We had a blast at our house! It was my baby sister's 12th birthday and we had a birthday bash/Easter celebration at our house. It was a much needed break from normal life!

I wanted to make her some special cupcakes. My family is basically obsessed with coconut, so I made coconut cupcakes from scratch with coconut frosting uptop!

Aren't they fun? Here is the recipe that I used for the cupcakes...

Coconut Cupcakes

2 sticks unsalted butter

2 cups sugar

5 extra large eggs

1 1/2 tsp. pure vanilla

1 1/2 tsp. pure almond extract

3 cups flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. kosher salt

1 cup buttermilk

14 oz. sweetened, shredded coconut

Crem butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add eggs one at a time. 

Add almond and vanilla.

In separate bowl, sift flour, baking soda and powder, and salt.

In 3 parts, alternately add the dry ingredients and the buttermilk to batter, beginning and ending with dry mix.

Fold in coconut.

Fill cupcake liner 3/4 to full.

Bake for 25-35 minutes at 325 degrees. 

I found it in one of my many recipe books and then just adapted it to what I wanted.

I halved this recipe and still got almost 24 cupcakes which was more than plenty! Also, I had forgotten to buy buttermilk. I looked online and found that if you add one cup of milk and 1 3/4 tsp. cream of tartar it is a substitution for buttermilk. It worked great!

I didn't have time to make homemade icing, so I used buttermilk frosting from the store and dyed it green. I dyed coconut green to look like grass and topped it off with M&Ms as eggs. It was a lot of fun to make!

See those cookies in the middle? They are coconut white chocolate chip cookies. YUM! 

Later at night we had an Easter egg dying contest. We never claimed to be artists! :) But we sure had fun!

This was the winning egg, which was mine! Although I'm pretty sure that they just gave it to me because they felt bad. The weird green mustache on him is a very long story! We decided that it looks more like Kermit's half-brother Fernando, than it actually looks like Kermit.

Oh yes, and we also planked. Don't ask me why, I'm just the photographer! But I do know that these are my favorite people in the whole world! And after a trying week, this day was exactly what I needed.

I hope you all had a great Easter!