February 4th, 2011

Coconut Cream Layer Cake

I have been on a baking binge this winter and the birthdays of coworkers has finally given me a safe outlet. I was chatting with one of the technicians about the project manager who only wears Hawaiian shirts (he's from Hawaii), and mentioned that he was wearing a new shirt today. Last year we came up with this awesome plan to have everyone wear Hawaiian shirts for the day in honor of his birthday. So when the PM walked into the lab, the technician naturally remembered to ask when his birthday was. "Tomorrow."

Woah. We had no time! So we immediately send out an e-mail to everyone to get them in on the last-minute Hawaiian shirt-wearing theme. Then began to plan our Hawaiian-themed party. Really this just involved someone maybe picking up some leis and me agreeing to make a cake. So I went with coconut, since I love coconut.

I chose Alton Brown's Coconut Cake by way of this really delicious baking blog. It would be one of my first traditional cakes from scratch. What I mean by traditional is that I really love cake mix with added pudding. I will jazz up the mix, go to down on shapes and frosting - but the base cake is never my own creation when it comes to fluffy, cakey cake. This is kind of a daunting recipe. Four layers, filling, 7-minute frosting, and 5 different types of coconut products.

I managed to get the four layers baked, filling, frosted and topped, following instructions to the t, but mine really wasn't quite as lovely looking as the recipe blog photos. I used pre-separated egg whites for the batter, which immediately fell after I reached stiff peaks. So they weren't as fluffy as they were supposed to be. this resulted in a more dense, drier cake. However, the coconut water-soak saved the day to make it ultra moist. The 7-minute frosting was also less fluffy than it was supposed to be, which I'm sure was a temperature thing that I didn't notice. You can tell that its sort of glassy.

Overall everyone loved the cake - its richly sweet with every kind of coconut you can think of - coconut cream, coconut water, coconut milk, coconut extract, coconut shavings. I ended up cracking a coconut on my front stoop in like 20 degree weather with a hammer because I having issues cracking indoors. A man was walking by with his Pomeranian who really, really wanted some coconut. It was an odd scene between us.

This image was captured last minute on the travel tray right before we cut into it. Poor lighting. I would like a prettier cake holder with a 9-inch base rather than 8 inch, but this old Tupperware one that my mom gave me has the most secure handle/locking mechanism on the market. The new ones are all really sketch.