Southern Coconut Cake (Cake Slice Bakers)

Southern Coconut Cake

For this month's, Cake Slice Bakers, we voted to make Southern Coconut Cake from Alisa Huntsman's book: Sky-High Cakes: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes. (Luckily, I made it early before my oven started giving me troubles.)

I must tell you something. I'm not a fan of flaked coconut. I do enjoy coconut milk in Thai food curries and the "makes me weak in the knees" mango with sticky rice. But I can't stand the texture of flaked coconut. Seriously, there is very little difference between coconut and dental floss.

And that's why I love my job. It's interesting, challenging, and there is a group of people who like coconut!! :)

I loved the cake. The cake has a lovely crumb and uses coconut milk for a delicious (sans dental floss) coconut yumminess. Okay, I had to make this cake twice. The first time, I completely missed the sugar! What?! How did that happen? Well, this recipe uses the fat-flour method and mixes the dry ingredients with the butter before adding in the wet ingredients. If it started with creaming the butter and sugar, I wouldn't have forgotten the sugar (at least I hope so! :) Oh, well, it was sorta funny when it happened!

I made the frosting twice too! The original recipe calls for an Italian meringue technique (adding hot sugar syrup to egg whites), but I tried the Swiss meringue technique (heating the sugar and egg whites over a double-boiler) since I'm more familiar with it and I can get the egg whites up to 160 degrees. But adding the cream cheese/butter mixture didn't go as planned and I ended up with soup (the meringue was probably too warm). All my fault. I should have followed the recipe exactly and not messed with it!

I ended up creaming together 12 ounces (1 1/2 blocks) of cream cheese, 4 T (1/2 stick) of butter, 2 cups of powdered sugar and 2 t vanilla for a frosting. It was yummy and easy.

My co-workers really liked it. I could smell the coconut from my desk! I pushed off the dental floss and enjoyed the cake and cream cheese frosting.

You can find the recipe on Gigi's blog but you should really buy the book: Sky-High Cakes by Alisa Huntsman. All the recipes have been sooooo good!! Can't wait for next month's selection!