If I'd-a known you was comin'

Happy Easter, everyone! To celebrate, Jon and I visited family - but that didn't stop me from cooking! For me, holidays are all about the food (ok, seeing family is fantastic too). So for Easter dinner I brought all the sides - layered salad, German potato salad, strawberry pie, and...

Coconut cake! This is not *my* coconut cake - a mishap has rendered my photos temporarily (perhaps permanently) inaccessible. *le sigh*

I've been wanting to bake a coconut cake for a while. There's a recipe in my Best Recipe cookbook, and Harry and Sally (of When Harry Met Sally) had one at their wedding. But it's hard to eat a whole cake by oneself. Enter: relatives.

But while I'm proud of the way the cake turned out (the pie was good too, but didn't have enough sugar in the filling) I consider my crowning achievement the carrying apparatus. I know that people have Tupperware cake containers for traveling with a layer cake - but I don't! And one of those would take up so much room in my small kitchen, and I'd only use it a few times a year. So I had to improvise. I used our wooden Chinese Checkers board, covered in foil, as a cake board. I topped it with a basket of the perfect size. I tied some string around the whole thing and presto! Carrying device.

Here's the recipe, adapted from America's Test Kitchen's The New Best Recipe:

Coconut Layer Cake

Ingredients:

• 1 egg
• 5 egg whites
• 1 can cream of coconut, divided (In the grocery store, this is near the alcohol - it's used most commonly in piña coladas.)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/4 cups flour, sifted
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp salt 
• 1 1/2 sticks of butter, softened, but cool (not melted), and cut into pieces
  
• 1 container whipped vanilla frosting (I used Duncan Hines, because it was the cheapest.)
• 4 cups sweetened coconut 

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and grease two round cake pans.
In a small bowl or liquid measuring cup, beat the egg and egg whites with a fork until combined. Add 3/4 cup cream of coconut and vanilla and beat vigorously until combined. In a large bowl (if you have a standup mixer, this is an excellent bowl to use!) combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt (again - mixer, use a paddle attachment). Add the butter, piece by piece, and stir until the mixture is crumbly, and the lumps of butter are smaller than peas. Slowly add the egg mixture, stirring constantly, until batter is combined. It will be thick and sticky. Divide between the two pans. Bake for 20 minutes, then turn the pans around (so the side that was in the back of the oven is now in front) and bake for another 10 minutes. Remove the cakes from the pans and cool on wire racks. Don't turn the oven off! Spread the coconut on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for 15 minutes, stirring about 3 times during cooking.

Frosting: The regular recipe tells you to make your own egg white/buttercream/coconut icing. I had a lot on my plate today, so I combined the vanilla frosting with 1/4 cup of the cream of coconut, and used that to frost the cake. To finish it off, lightly press handfuls of the toasted coconut onto the top and sides of the cake until it's fully covered. Voila!