This was toasted shredded coconut made from fresh coconut on homemade doughnuts.
This story focused on coconut, not doughnuts. Well, perhaps both. It began when J casually said it would be nice to make our own coconut flakes for doughnuts from a fresh coconut while he was grabbing a fresh coconut at a local Wegmans store. I believe this idea stems from our
last doughnut experience - the commercial fine coconut flakes that I used as a doughnut topping didn't taste like coconut at all. What could be more coconut-y than shredded coconut made from fresh coconut? His idea was fantastic. My own question was whether he knew how to do it, more precisely, who would do it. Such a concern was extinguished by J's quick action: a fresh coconut ball happily came home with us. The project was on.
It wasn't our first time to handle a fresh coconut. In fact, there was "Project Coconut" a few years ago. At that time, J squeezed out
fresh coconut water from a fresh coconut; I made
toasted coconut meal, fresh coconut milk, and
dried coconut flour. This time our goal was to make shredded coconut. Like the Project Coconut, J kindly helped me again to pour out coconut water and crack the shell. We chilled coconut water and enjoyed it later. Removing coconut fresh from the shell was more troublesome than what I remembered, though.
To shred coconut fresh, I used a cheese grater. It was another hard task, but worked well!
Then, I dried the shredded coconut in the 200F oven about 1 hour, tossing every 15 minutes. The result was beautiful snow white shredded coconut! One coconut became a plenty of shredded coconut.
For doughnut topping, I pan-toasted a handful of freshly made shredded coconut, and saved the rest in the refrigerator for another use. The doughnuts were made with
King Arther Flour's buttermilk doughnut mix, and the chocolate glaze was simply the mixture of melted semi-sweet chocolate chip and a little bit of heavy cream.
Finally we achieved the moment to munch the special doughnuts! They were delightful. Most importantly, the shredded coconut was lovely coconut-y. J was right!
