Conquering the Coconut Cake

Of all the many things I’ve learned to cook without milk and eggs, cake has probably been the most difficult. Eggs provide the stability to cakes so baking without them provided a variety of complications. In fact, early on in my food allergy baking experience, I had several people tell me that baking large egg-free cakes wasn’t possible as they didn’t have the stable structure needed to keep the center from falling. Me, being the person I am, refused to accept that and after a good amount of trial and error, have spent many years successfully baking full-sized, multi-layer cakes that are not only lovely to look at, but wonderful to eat as well.

Last summer, I had a hankering for a good coconut cake. A few years ago, Kneaders had a coconut cake with pineapple filling that was a tropical delight. I decided I was going to recreate that lovely confection so that Matthew, who loves both coconut and pineapple, could enjoy it as well. After poring over a variety of recipes and making a number of necessary adjustments for high altitude as well as no eggs, I made my first attempt. Those poor cakes tasted lovely, but they were flat, only about an inch of height in each layer. It was more like eating a coconut pancake.

Not to be deterred, I made a second attempt and was quite hopefully as the layers baked up nice and tall and beautiful looking…right up until I pulled them out of the even and they began to cool. Then the centers sank in, a lot. We ended up with a lovely swimming pool of pineapple filling in the center of each layer.

My third attempt rose nicely and retained its shape when cool, but the cakes were quite dense, which in and of itself is not a problem. It was just not quite the fluffy, light cake I had in mind. But by then we had eaten a lot of coconut cake, so I called the attempt a partial success and moved on to other things…like baking all the goodies for the gatherings for both Malia’s baptism and Daniel’s missionary (non)farewell. But in my mind, I still had that idea of the ideal coconut cake floating in my mind and I knew I was going to need to revisit the challenge at a later date.

I has been about five months since my experimentations with coconut cake and I’ve reached the point where I was starting to crave coconut again. My birthday was a few days ago and I figured that was the perfect excuse to make a fourth attempt. This time the layers baked up nice and light, didn’t sink, and were fluffy and moist. With the addition of a creamy coconut filling, a light cream cheese frosting, and a coating of toasted coconut (all dairy free, of course), it was an absolute delight to consume. So happy birthday to me. I’ve finally conquered the coconut cake!

And as a random side note, at 46 I’m now officially closer to fifty than forty. It is weird to think about.

(I know this does not look particularly lovely, but that is because the cake is so moist that it has a tendency to stick to the knife as it is cut. A sharper knife and a chilled cake probably would have provided a prettier cut.)