How to Make a Coconut Cake – Or Not
Today’s post is another oldie from 2005, written in honor of my father-in-law’s birthday. Today is his 87th birthday, so I’m posting this for him!
My mom taught me how to cook and continues to be my inspiration. Don’t have a needed ingredient? Improvise. Doesn’t turn out like it’s supposed to? Improvise. Tired of the same-ol’-same-ol? Improvise.
Monday is my father-in-law”s 78th birthday. His favorite cake is coconut cake. I really don’t know how to make a coconut cake, but that hasn’t stopped me from attempting it various times in the past, and fool that I am, I promised him one for an impromptu birthday celebration tomorrow afternoon.
The white cake part is easy. Buy a box, follow the directions, more or less. Done.
The hard part is the icing—that divinity stuff made from egg whites and boiled sugar? In years’ past, I guess I didn’t cook the sugar syrup part long enough, and made way more icing than I really needed. I didn’t want to waste any of it, so I put massive amounts on the two layers of cake, and then tossed on coconut freely. The end result was always tasty. It looked like a spring-thaw avalanche in the Swiss Alps, but it was tasty.
This afternoon, I headed to Wal-Mart to get what I needed for the cake. Of course, I didn’t bother to check ahead of time to see WHAT I needed for the cake, so while I stood in the baking aisle, I whipped out my cell phone and called my mom for ingredients. (She used to make these cakes.) She called off what I needed and I grabbed the necessary items from the shelf.
Got home with said ingredients, and got out my notebook of favorite recipes to find the icing recipe. Nope. Not there. Called my mom for the second time. And she patiently read off the directions, including the part about cooking the sugar water stuff on the stove to a soft boil, or about 236 degrees F. No problem.
Got the cake baked with no problems, and once it cooled, I started in on the icing. I put the sugar and water mixture in a double boiler and started it heating. Since I just knew it wouldn’t take too long, I went ahead and started beating the egg whites.
I don’t really understand the art of beating egg whites, but did manage to get them to a consistency similar to what I envisioned they should look like.
And the phone rang. It was Anne, my father-in-law”s wife. She was calling to see if we’d like some honey baked ham. They’d gotten one of those spiral sliced things and couldn’t eat it all. She offered to bring some over from next door. “Great!”
Roly, our aging dog, likes to perch on the doormat just outside the back door on the porch so we won’t have an opportunity to forget that we haven’t let him for the night. Trouble is, moving him can be a challenge.
Anne got to the door with the ham (still on the bone) perched on a slick dinner plate, not very securely wrapped in foil. She tried to get Roly to move, and in the process the ham slid off the plate to the porch (landing on the skin side, thankfully). The plate fell, as well as a couple of pieces of ham. Roly figured he’d died and gone to doggy heaven—which is where Anne was ready to send him. She rescued the hambone and left the plate for Roly to continue “cleaning.” And I rescued her. I took some slices of ham and the rewrapped it and offered to take it back next door for her.
Meanwhile, the mixture in the double boiler was cooking and cooking and cooking, but the temperature refused to climb above 140–even after I realized that I had left my thermometer in its protective covering while it was swimming in the sugar mixture.
So…. Call #3 to my mom who told me doing this in a double boiler just wouldn’t get hot enough, and that I needed to just cook it directly on the stove top. “But be sure and watch it so that it doesn’t get too hard or too hot!” No problem.
I transferred the stuff to a sauce pan and set it on the stove and got it heating nicely.
Meanwhile, I glanced back at my egg whites, whose lovely nearly-stiff peaks had deteriorated to a soggy mess. Time to beat them some more!
Somewhere along the line, I guess I had a dyslexic moment. I could have sworn that I was supposed to cook the sugar syrup to 263 degrees instead of 236. So when I peaked at the thermometer in the midst of my egg white beating, I was pleased to see that it had indeed made it to at least 263 degrees. It looked a little thick, a little dark, and somehow reminded me of molasses, but hey, I’d gotten it to the “right” temperature.
I got my daughter, Merrilee, to help pour the syrup into my egg white mixture. And I kept beating.
I’ve never made taffy before. At least not before tonight. Not to be daunted by icing that was a WEE bit thicker than it ought to be, we set about the task of icing the cake. Tore that sucker up good.
Not to be outdone, I knew I still had to add the coconut, which I did. Some of it even stuck to the cake. I’ll get to cleaning up the excess on the counter eventually.
Now, remember what I said earlier about my mom being my inspiration and how she taught me how to improvise and be creative in the kitchen? Well, I’ve passed that on to Merrilee. In spades.
“I know what we can do! Let’s dump the whole cake in a big bowl and we’ll just mix it all up with our hands and then pack it into a loaf pan!”
Sounded like a great idea to me. So we did. The icing had sort of the consistency of gummy worms. We sprinkled on some more coconut on top just for good measure.
By this time, Merrilee and I were having fits of giggling. No, we’d past the giggling stage long before. We were howling uncontrollably.
Figured my mom needed to hear “the rest of the story” so I called her again (#4). We both had a good laugh. She suggested putting a cherry on the top of the cake mush to make it look like it was all planned this way. We decided that substituting the cherry tomatoes I had for the cherries I didn’t stretched even our bounds of proper improvisation.
And Merrilee just called from Wal-Mart to say that yes, they do have coconut cakes.
So tomorrow, we’ll have two to choose from.
Anybody want a great recipe for a coconut cake?
© Melissa Clark Vickers 2005
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March 19th, 2022 at 3:38 pm
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