Wholly Guacamole - Dessert?

Dessert?  With Guacamole?  Yes, I set out to make a dessert with at least one of my gifts from Wholly Guacamole.  I found lots of recipes out there on the interweb.  I settled on Avocado Cupcakes with Key Lime Buttercream.

I bake.  I bake a lot.  What’s more than a lot?  That’s how much I bake.  I bake to raise money for my Breast Cancer 3-Day walk each year.  I bake to relieve stress.  I bake for each of my coworker’s birthdays.  I bake sweet things like cookies and cakes.  I bake breads and even English muffins.  I bake.  I’ve never baked with avocado, until now.

The recipe seemed simple enough, at first.  That was until I tried to figure out how much of the nicely packaged avocado Wholly Guacamole sent me was the equivalent of “one large avocado.”  I consulted The Google and there seems to be some discrepancy out there.  One site said “1/4 of a large avocado is ½ cup of pulp.”  How large is a large avocado?  In my mind I couldn’t picture a quarter of an avocado after the pit and skin were removed, resulting in half a cup of pulp.  Another site said that two medium avocados provided one and a half cups of pulp.  And yet another site said that one large avocado yielded one cup of pulp.  Ok, I’ll just guess!

The recipe was from the California Avocado website.  They had to know what they were talking about, right?

The batter was pretty simple, cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, butter, sugar, vanilla, eggs, buttermilk and one ripe, fresh California avocado, seeded, peeled and pureed until smooth.  Lucky for me, I had a nice package of pre-pureed (for the most part) avocado I could add.

The batter was a sort of a pretty green.

 

The cupcakes baked up a kind of a nice green, if there is such a thing.

While the cupcakes were cooling I made the “buttercream” frosting.  I put it in quotes because it is nothing like my buttercream.  My buttercream uses a pound of butter!  This called for just two ounces of butter!  The frosting also called for cream cheese, lime zest, key lime juice, milk, vanilla, powdered sugar and half of an avocado.  It didn’t really come together all that nicely for me.  It was very runny even before I added the milk and vanilla so I added more sugar to get it to a consistency I thought I could pipe.  I didn’t want to leave out the vanilla so I added that but no milk.  It was very limey!  Make your mouth pucker limey in fact.  Not my favorite but let’s try it on the cupcake.

First I tried just the cake part of the cupcake.  It was good.  Not great.  I guess if I closed my eyes and thought really hard about the flavor I might have said “yes, there’s avocado in there!”  But they were really just kind of sweet.  Then with the frosting, well, too much for me!  Dave thought they were ok, but we both think avocado is better used in savory dishes!