Moana Pineapple Coconut Cupcake

Coconut cupcakes with pineapple filling, fluffed with marshmallow frosting, and topped with a Moana pick and palm trees.

I apologize if you came here to find a recipe for the cupcakes. This post isn’t a tutorial on the coconut cupcakes.  

I was testing a recipe for Makena and Hunter’s fourth birthday party cake, but I made it into cupcakes, so I could pass them around to friends and neighbors. They turned out pretty cute, so I thought I’d share it if anyone wanted to use the decoration idea for a Moana birthday theme.

Sunny printed the Moana picture and mounted them on glitter paper rounds and attached a long toothpick. I thought if you were serving these on a platter, it would be fun to intermingle some cupcakes with palm trees.

The trees are made with Wilton’s Candy Melts. I already had dark chocolate and green candy melts, so I used them. If you only have white, you can easily color the white chocolate.  

I just piped by free hand onto wax paper, so they all looked a little different. If you want uniform trees, draw on a piece of paper, the tree you want. You only need one tree. Place the paper under the wax paper and copy the tree. Move the paper along under the wax paper to make each one.  

I was kind of lazy to get out the piping tips, so I just put the chocolate in a plastic snack bag and snipped a little corner off. Doing it by free hand, I made a long jiggedy trunks. Be sure you make them long enough to sink into the cupcakes. For the palm leaves, I did the same thing. To get a leafy effect, you can push and pull in small jerky movements.

The grandkids had their birthday last week and I made the recipe into a two layer filled cake with Moana riding her boat on top of it. Sunny did an amazing job with the decorations, as usual.  She even made a giant colored coral reef as a backdrop for the patio. Too clever!