My good friend in Nashville said her mother wasn't a great cook while she was growing up but her favorite food memory was her coconut cake. I had the pleasure of meeting her mother while in town recently and asked her for the recipe so I could recreate it for my son who loves it. She went on the hunt for it and sent me this picture telling me she'd have to decipher it for me as it was so faded.
All I could make out at the bottom was to add coconut while icing the cake... The next day she sent a new copy 😊. I noticed it was just the icing recipe and it was her sisters she explained. She told me she just used white boxed cake mix and whole eggs. She also said she used to use freshly grated coconut on the icing but it was too much work now and she told me not to use sweetened or it would taste "yucky". And she made me chuckle when she said her last cake was a disaster as she had used "expired" ingredients and told me not to do that as it wouldn't work out well😆.
I asked my son to pick up the coconut at Costco as it was ridiculously priced at the grocery store and he came home with a 5 lb bag, lol. I'm trying to pawn it off to anyone I see as what will I do with it??? I noticed it said "Monkey Labour Free" 🐒on the bag 🤔. They get monkeys to pick coconuts??? I had no idea!
She also said she doesn't toast her coconut. I told her I might because I'm bougie and snobby which was a joke when I met her as I was bugging her daughter for using canned mushrooms on pizza. I explained how it easy it was to slice a few fresh ones and her mother flipped her nose up at me like I was a snob, haha. Then she admitted she uses canned mushrooms too 🤷🏽♀️❓
Here's what I used:
- 1 cup of 2% milk with 4 tablespoons all purpose flour
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter
- 1/2 cup Vegetable Crisco
- 1 cup organic sugar
- 2 "Betty Crocker" White Cake Mixes with whole eggs and avocado oil (prepared to package directions. I checked that they were not expired since I bought them at the "Dollar Store")
- Coconut, shredded and toasted and not harvested by Monkeys 🐵
I have never seen Crisco used in an icing recipe so I had to google it:
"A quick tip for modern baking:
Crisco changed its recipe years ago to remove trans fats. Because of this, modern Crisco can sometimes leave a greasy, waxy mouthfeel and lacks flavor compared to the older versions. Many bakers today use a 50/50 blend (half Crisco for the structure and half butter for the flavor) to get the best of both worlds." The recipe already did that so A-OK 👌🏼, I hoped...
I heated the milk and white flour and whisked until thickened. I took it off the heat to cool and pressed plastic wrap on top to stop a film from being formed.
While the cakes were cooling, I toasted the coconut. If I've ever done it before, I didn't remember doing it. I used a non-stick skillet, dry and stirred it with a spatula over low-med heat until browned and then I put it in a cool bowl as I learned with nuts that they will continue to cook and burn if you leave it in the hot pan! It tasted dry. I hoped the icing would save it! I had to bring out the Kitchen Aid stand mixer to make the icing. That went fine, tasted good and was nice and fluffy.
I sliced some of the cake off but it was still uneven. I did a lousy icing job and a worse job of putting the coconut on. It went everywhere!!! I really would have liked LARGE flakes, not this shredded stuff.
Anyway, my son loved it and was very thankful. And I'm glad because that will be the last time I ever make it, lol. It felt like I used every dish in the kitchen and I'll find coconut probably for years in my kitchen. It sure makes me appreciate what bakers do. I hate baking and by how rarely I do it, it shows. I served my son's with the last scoop of Häagen-Dazs vanilla bean ice cream which melted by the time I got the slice to the plate and coconut flying like a windstorm 💨.
Below, here is a picture of Ms. Judith with her coconut cake and it looks as beautiful as her! 🤩 And it looks much better than mine, it probably has fresh coconut on it 🥥. The icing was delicious and I thank her for sharing it with me.
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