"Bird Nest" Carrot Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

Happy Easter!! I'm enjoying a wonderful Easter weekend at home with my family in good ol' upstate NY, and I hope that if you celebrate Easter, you're enjoying the holiday as well! As per usual, my mom asked me to bake a dessert for Easter dinner (hmmmm, I wonder why she asked me to bake something?!). Although I love carrot cake, I have never made it (gasp!), so I thought I'd give it a whirl since it seems like a very spring-like, Easter dessert to me. I mean, carrots & bunnies....they go hand in hand, right?

As you can see, I took these carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting a step further to make them "bird nests." Fun! The family appreciated my efforts to be festive. :)

The recipe I followed was really quite simple. The only step that took a little more time than usual was grating the carrots, but thanks to my food processor, it really didn't add that much time! Oh, and another great point about this recipe? It's Cooking Light! Check out the recipe here.

As you can see, the recipe calls for crushed pineapple and pecans, in addition to the grated carrots. I chose not to add the pecans (simply because I did not want my cupcakes to have a crunch to them). The pineapple is a fabulous addition to this recipe. It definitely makes the cake more moist, I think! Overall, this cake was pretty dense too, and I think that may also be attributed to the pineapple (and possibly the "weight" of the carrots too). The whole fam really enjoyed these cupcakes. They had just the right amount of sweetness to them, and both the carrot and pineapple flavors really came through. I love a moist cupcake, so these were top-notch in my book!

The batter doesn't look all that appetizing, but don't let that fool you. It tastes great, I promise. ;-)

I obviously had to use cute Easter cupcake liners!

I also toasted some coconut to use for the "bird nests," as you'll see shortly... It's super simple to toast coconut!

Mmmm, cream cheese frosting. It's always great to have a classic cream cheese frosting in your repertoire, so if you don't have one yet, I'd recommend this one! It was deeelish. Also of note, I only used about 2.5 cups of powdered sugar although the recipe calls for 3 cups.

Here's my little "decorating station" at my mom's kitchen table. :)

To make the "nests," I simply sprinkled some coconut around the outside of each cupcake and then placed a couple Cadbury mini eggs in the middle! You may recall that Cadbury mini eggs made it to an edition of my Friday Favorites a couple weeks ago. ;-) 

Too darn cute.

 Once again, Happy Easter, friends!