Ingredients
125g of butter
1 cup of sugar
1 tablespoon of vanilla essence
3 eggs
1 cup of buttermilk
bottle of red food colouring (you also can use the powder, gel or beets finely grated)
½ tsp of bicarb
1 Tbsp white vinegar
2 cups plain cake flour
2 Tbsp of cocoa
3 tsp of baking powder
A pinch of salt
½ a cup of fine apricot jam
½ a cup of hot water
1 pack of fine coconut
Method
Preheat the oven to 190°C.
Using an electric mixer, beat the butter until smooth. Then add the sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time and, beating well after each addition, beat in the vanilla.
In a separate bowl, sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, bicarb and salt. Add this alternately with the buttermilk, starting and ending with the flour. Stir the white vinegar and food colouring together and add this to the cake batter on low speed, but mixing until blended in.
Pour cake batter into cupcake holders that’s in your muffin pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a tester inserted in the centre of the cakes comes out clean. Cool the cupcakes in their pans for 20 minutes, then turn them out to cool completely.
Take out two deep bowls. In the one bowl add your jam and water and stir until jam has dissolved. In the other bowl, add the fine coconut.
Take all the cupcake holders of the individual cakes and while the syrup is still warm, dip each cupcake one by one into the jam syrup just long enough to let it soak in a bit , then dip into fine coconut and cover completely. Shake a little and place on serving tray until all cakes are covered.
The jam will make it sweet , so I don’t add any other icing or vanilla cream. , but you can if you wish.