.: evil jungle prince :.

As usual, I was craving coconut in a big way today. This craving of mine in turn got me looking at coconut recipes on Recipezaar in an attempt to locate an interesting recipe that would satisfy my insatiable appetite for coconut. Stumbling across this recipe, I wondered if I wouldn't be able to notch up the coconut factor by using a real coconut.

1. I began by using a hammer to whack open a fresh coconut. It fell cleanly into two pieces, coming pre-scored from the grocery store. I then used my handy-dandy scraper tool and scraped out the coconut meat for use in the muffins. Mmmmm, coconut!

2. I then preheated the oven to 375F and placed 1 1/4 cups flour, 2/3 cup sugar, and 1 tsp baking soda in a mixing bowl. Set aside. In a blender, I briefly blended 2 ripe bananas, 1/2 cup butter, 1 egg, and a dash of vanila concentrate. I then combined the two and mixed,, adding 1/2 cup of the freshly grated coconut near the end.

3. After dividing the batter into paper cups, I then placed the remaining fresh coconut on top of the muffins. These were baked for 25 mins.

I was pretty happy with these. The taste of the freshly grated coconut really made the dish, although if I were to bake these again I would leave out a lot of the sugar. The called-for amount of 2/3 cups sugar was too sweet for my taste, although most of my countrymen would probably beg to differ.

Because somebody asked, here is a photo of the scraping tool I used on the coconut (see wooden tool at bottom). The upper part of this wooden tool is what I used to scrape the coconut, which did a fine job. The bottom portion, by the way, is used for shredding green papaya and does a far better job than anything else I own. This is one of my favorite kitchen gadgets and likely the most useful and valuable 99 cent purchase I've ever made. It's from the Philippines. (Can't remember what it's called though?)

The plastic tool up above is another one of my don't-know-what-I-did-before-I-found-this tools. The serrated edge at the bottom is the best cucumber and daikon shredder I have ever used, although surprisingly it is terrible at shredding green papaya. The top portion which is a straight edge is used for skinning vegetables such as potato, carrot, daikon, and cucumber; alternatively it can be used to make very thin, sashimi-style cuts of vegetables. I love this thing and at $10.00, a wise investment. This one is from Japan and was purchased at Mitsuwa Department Store.