Recipes Discovered

Coconut Cake with 7-Minute Frosting Recipe

This cake recipe has been haunting me for months. I’ve had the recipe laying, always asking myself will it be worth the effort. I ask this because the cake requires freshly made coconut milk and coconut cream, which requires cracking open a couple of coconuts. The recipe comes from Alton Brown, so it also requires precise measurements, which I’ve always been a bit sloppy with. I was inspired this week though, so being up for the challenge (along with my new digital scale), I bought two coconuts and finally tackled the coconut cake.

I could only find white coconuts at the grocery store when I was there. I have searched the Internet quite a bit, and I’m still not quite sure what the difference is. I know coconuts start off being green and then turn brown when they ripen, but I don’t know where the white fits in. I had Seth hammer a screwdriver through two of the coconut ‘eyes’, drained the water out, and put the coconut in the oven like the recipe suggests. After 15 minutes, the coconut hadn’t cracked at all, so I had Seth beat it with a meat mallet until the coconut cracked in half. I was quite surprised to find a very thin, gel-like layer of coconut inside instead of the thick, white coconut meat. I lived in Hawaii for quite awhile and had never seen a coconut like this one. >> I figured that was possibly the difference in the white coconut, but I knew I could never grate the coconut into shreds for the outer garnish. After some debate, I decided to use the coconut meat to make the coconut cream and coconut milk, but to buy the unsweetened grated coconut at the natural food store. I put the jelly-like coconut meat into my food processor, and basically chopped it up into a fine dice. I divided it into two bowls, one with 2 ounces in and one with 4 ounces in and then poured a 1/2 cup of boiling milk into each dish. I covered them and allowed them to set for an hour before blending each in the blender. The recipe goes on to say the mixture should be strained through a tea towel, but there wasn’t anything solid in my mixture, so I skipped that step. Once the coconut milk and coconut cream were made, I moved on to the coconut cake.

In a large bowl, I combined flour, baking powder, and salt. In another small bowl, I combined the coconut milk and coconut cream. In the bowl to my mixer, I added the butter, and began to mix it for a minute until it was light and fluffy. I slowly added the sugar to the butter, and continued to mix for another 3 minutes. I added the coconut extract to the mixture, and then, with the mixer on low, added the flour mixture and the coconut cream/milk mixture alternately. The recipe states not to over mix the batter, so I only mixed it until I couldn’t see the flour anymore. Since I only have one bowl for my mixer, I transferred the cake mixture to a separate large bowl, washed my mixing bowl, and returned it to the mixer with the egg whites, which I whisked until they formed stiff peaks. At this point, the cake mixture is extremely thick, so folding the egg whites in is a bit tricky. I added about a third of the egg whites and just stirred them in to lighten the batter a little bit. I then folded in the remaining egg whites. It takes a bit of time, but it eventually comes together. Once divided into two cake pans, I baked them in a 375 degree oven. A side note about cake pans: I have two different cake pans – one by Chicago Metallic and one by Wilton. The cake baking in the Wilton pan took 35 minutes, the cake baking in the Chicago Metallic pan took 40 minutes. The cake in the Chicago Metallic pan baked up much lighter and fluffier. I never really saw a side by side comparison of cake pans before, so I thought that was interesting. Anyway, one baked, I turned the cakes out of the pans onto cooling racks and let them cool completely.

Once the cakes were cool, I split each cake into two layers and brushed coconut water over each piece. In a large bowl I combined more coconut water, egg whites, sugar, cream of tarter, and salt. I put this bowl over a saucepan of boiling water, and began mixing it on low for one minute and then turned the mixer to high for 5 minutes. The frosting thickens and expands quite a bit during this time, and by the time I was done mixing, it resembled marshmallow creme. I beat in vanilla and coconut extract and then let the frosting cool for 5 minutes before spreading on the cake. Spreading the frosting is a little tricky since it’s a little runny. Keeping the cake layers even is also a bit difficult, so once I had all the layers together, put a chopstick down the middle of the cake to stabilize it. After 30 minutes in the fridge, the frosting set up enough to take the chopstick out, at which point I covered the cake. I removed the cake from the fridge about 30 minutes before serving it as well.

So now the question left to answer is this – was it worth all the effort? I don’t know how I can say ‘yes’ emphatically enough. This cake was so outrageous good, it can’t be described. The cake is light with a delicious coconut flavor, the icing is creamy with even more coconut flavor, and although it wasn’t fresh coconut, the unsweetened coconut was perfect. It’s a little more work than a normal cake, but it’s the best coconut cake I have ever had. It was so good in fact, that I made another one a couple days after I made the first one so Seth could take it to work with him. And interestingly, the second coconut (which was also a white coconut) looked much more like a normal coconut than the first one. So the mystery of the white coconut remains, but either way, it makes an amazing cake.

Coconut Cake with 7-Minute Frosting Recipe