Naga Bar Cupcakes: The Gestalt Cupcake

I've never been one to really enjoy eating chocolate. I know others of my gender have huge chocolate cravings on a regular basis, but it's just never excited me that much. I've even been to Belgium and tried some of the world's finest, but eh, no big deal. This was the case, until I discovered Vosges chocolates. These chocolate bars (found at Whole Foods for those in STL) are sensational. They come in a variety of creative flavors and tend to mix sweet with spicy. They even come with specific instructions on how to eat them so that you get the full sensory experience. When my husband and I open a bar, we each limit ourselves to one square a day to stretch out the enjoyment of it as long as we can. Anyway, just try one.

My favorite bar is the Naga bar. It contains sweet Indian curry powder, coconut flakes, and deep milk chocolate. Imagine my excitement when I happened upon a cupcake recipe based upon the Naga bar. I decided right then that that had to be the cupcake of the week.

The Naga bar recipe was found on one of my favorite food blogs, Vanilla Garlic.

It sounded fantabulous, however, it had pumpkin in it. My beloved Naga bar does not feature pumpkin. I decided to come up with my own cupcake version of the Naga bar. Don't worry pumpkin lovers, it's nothing personal against pumpkin. You may recall I already made the pumpkin cheesecake cupcakes and there will surely be more adventures in pumpkin to come.

I decided to use a basic coconut cupcake as the base for my cupcake. This was again found on Vanilla Garlic.

I then debated about the frosting. I thought about making a chocolate frosting directly out of the Naga bars. How bad could that be? I even wrote a comment on the Vanilla Garlic blog asking what he thought of the idea. The response brought me back to earth. The reason he hadn't done that was because the bars are $7 each. Did I fail to mention that fact before? Minor detail. You should still try one.

I opted instead for a coconut frosting from chockylit's blog.

But what about the chocolate? I decided to put the chocolate and curry powder into the cupcake itself. However, rather than putting it in the whole cupcake, I wanted to have layers. The top part would be just the coconut cupcake and the bottom would be the coconut cupcake plus chocolate and curry. I had no idea how this would work. Would the two layers just meld together or would I have a distinct line?

Turns out, it worked perfectly. There was a clear line between chocolate and not. The line wasn't smooth, but that's only because I didn't smooth out the chocolate layer before putting the other layer on top of it.

The cupcake cake was as a friend of mine would say a gestalt experience.

Gestalt: A collection of physical, biological, psychological or symbolic entities that creates a unified concept, configuration or pattern which is greater than the sum of its parts.

There were 3 different distinct flavors, the coconut cupcake, the chocolate coconut curry cupcake, and the coconut frosting. Each on it's own was good, but together it was mmm mmm great.

Another interesting thing to note is that it seems to be getting better by the day as the buttery coconut frosting seeps into the top layer of cupcake.

Not sure what to compare the ultimate flavor to, it didn't quite taste like a Naga bar, more like a particularly good marble pound cake topped with coconut and not as buttery.

More detailed baking notes:

• I opted not to put any coconut flakes in the batter. I just put them in the icing. This was partly because I wanted a smooth texture and partly because I wanted my husband to be able to enjoy the cupcakes and he doesn't like coconut flakes.


• In the chocolate half of the batter, I put 1/8 cup of cocoa powder and 1 t of curry powder. I didn't want it to be two chocolatey. I'd had my fill of really rich chocolate the week before.


• The coconut flakes in the icing were actually unsweetened rather than sweetened. That was all they sold at whole foods. It worked fine.


• The chocolate shavings on top of the cupcakes are from none other than a Naga Bar. :)