The great author Shakespeare once wrote "To Be or Not to Be, That is the Question." Well as a baker I say "To TOAST or NOT TO TOAST, THAT IS THE QUESTION"
Recently I had a friend text me and say she was craving a coconut cake and asked me about making one. Even though I knew she was joking because she lives hours away from me, it got me to thinking about the perfect coconut cake. Now I know coconut is one of those things that either you love it or you hate it, but for those who love it, its something that always brings back fond memories. I remember as a child my mom would make these deliciously moist cakes that were covered in coconut. A moist cake covered in fluffy white frosting and loads of white coconut.
For my birthday she would make her famous bunny cakes that were covered in coconut that she had dyed various colors.
As I contemplated making this cake, I wondered how I could modernize it and bring it into a modern version of the classic coconut. I thought of ways I could make it my own. As I thought about it there were 3 major things that I just had to have; 1) I wanted the inside of the cake to be white as opposed to yellow like most recipes I saw 2) I wanted to use CHIPPED/SHAVED coconut as opposed to the shredded coconut that you find in the grocery store 3) I wanted to experiment with toasting the coconut.
First one the list, was to find a recipe that yielded a perfectly white cake. I found a few but this one I found over at
Brown Eyed Baker seemed perfect. It was perfectly white and it had vanilla bean in the recipe, which made it ever more appealing to the eye. So part of my journey was completed.
The 2nd thing was finding shaved coconut which has larger flakes than the typical coconut and generally isn't sweetened. I searched far and wide, eventually (at about the 10th place I looked at) finding exactly what I wanted in
The Fresh Market. They had it over with their store packed nuts and berries. I was ecstatic, because I had recalled seeing it before but could not remember where I had seen it. I also found my new secret ingredient while in there. It's raw coconut butter
The last part was putting it all together. I followed the recipe I found on Brown Eyed Baker's Blog except I added about half of the pack of the coconut butter (about 2 tbs) to the recipe. That stuff is really power packed with coconut flavor. The cake cooked up beautifully and very fragrant. But when I got to the frosting part life became difficult. I added the rest of the coconut butter to my meringues but they never fully took shape and got fluffy so I had to improvise and great "creative". I thought maybe if a chilled it a while, it would be thick enough to frost my cake. That didn't work so I tried adding a block of cream cheese. It got a little thicker but still not thick enough to frost the cake, so then I added a canister of bought frosting that I had in the cabinet. Thicker but not as thick as I would have liked, but it did taste really good. I frosted the cake and put it in the refrigerator in hopes that it would hold up the onslaught of coconut I was prepared to hit it with.
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| Ingredients |
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| Dry Ingredients |
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| Vanilla bean looks good against this pale batter |
Toasting the coconut seemed to be pretty straight forward....Boy, was I wrong. I put it in a pan and placed it in the hot stove. I walked away for a few minutes and before I knew it the coconut was too toasted! 2nd try, I tried putting them in the pan and shutting the oven off after a few minutes. Came back a little while later...SAME RESULTS AS BEFORE.. 3rd try, I babysat the coconut, constantly shaking the pan to make sure they didn't sit still and then turned on the broiler and kept the pan moving until they were browned but not too brown.
Some folks like the classic plain jain
While some like to walk on the toasty side
So what do you think is better? To toast or not to toast?
