A Lifelong Learner

As the weather has warmed, the birds have returned to our yard. While most of them are indistinguishable from one another, we have one robin that we always recognize. He is the biggest, fattest robin any of us have ever seen, and he comes back every year. I think he has a nest in one of our backyard neighbors’ trees. When our chubby buddy returns, we know that spring is in full swing.

In celebration of spring and in anticipation of our celebration of Easter in a few weeks, this evening’s FHE treat falls in the category of fun food. I love coconut macaroons and figured this would be the perfect time to create some macaroon nests. I haven’t had macaroons for years, largely due to the fact that most macaroon recipes use egg whites to bind everything together, so I was test driving a new recipe as well. It is a recipe that uses sweetened condensed milk instead of eggs to act as the “glue” in the recipe. While standard sweetened condensed milk is also a no-no around here, I picked up a can of sweetened condensed coconut milk figuring it would be an easy swap. Therein lies my hubris because all things did not go according to plan. 

The dairy version of sweetened condensed milk comes in a 14 ounce can while the coconut one is only 11 ounces. I did some math to make the ratio of ingredients the same and set to work without any second thoughts. Non-dairy substitutes don’t always act the same way their lactose infused counterparts do however, and I did not take that into consideration. I formed my little nests and tucked them into the oven to bake. Eleven minutes later, I opened the oven and discovered with dismay that all my carefully created nests had melted into one giant puddle on the cookie sheet. I pulled them out, already pondering on how things had gone awry. Clearly the mixture was too wet to hold its shape, so I scraped all the nests on the second, unbaked tray back into my mixing bowl, added more flour and coconut in an attempt to save the remainder of the cookies, and popped them into the oven with fingers crossed. While the second batch baked, I did my best to scoop the first ones back into nest shape and stuck them in the fridge to see if they would set up.

When the oven timer went off the second time, my results were much better. The nests looked just as they should, were lightly touched with golden brown, and smelled delicious. The ones in the fridge, however, were still a mess. While they had set up a bit in the cool of the fridge, they were still so gooey that they stuck to the parchment paper they were sitting on. In fact, they were so wet that I began to wonder if I could add the additional ingredients and save the cookies. I figured that they were already a total failure, so doing some mad doctoring wasn’t going to make things any worse and might make them better. I grabbed my bench cutter, scraped the goo back into the bowl, added the additional ingredients, dropped the whole experiment into the oven, and crossed my fingers. 

Fifteen minutes later, I was pleased to discover that my culinary experiment was a complete success. It would seem that baking the sweetened condensed milk only made it a little more condensed and without any leavening in the recipe, it acted just the same as if it had never been in the oven. The twice baked batch looked just like the once baked ones, and they all looked pretty much like the pictures on the internet. 

I had taken careful notes of what I had added and with things working out well, I proceeded to write up the recipe so it could be duplicated in the future. As I compared my final recipe with the original one, I realized that it was nearly identical to the original, the only difference being a slightly smaller can of sweetened condensed coconut milk instead of a standard sized can of the dairy version. 🤦 Apparently, the canned food gods know better than I and taking their differences into consideration, in their sweetened condensed versions 11 ounces of coconut milk acts the same as 14 ounces of normal milk. After fifteen years of dairy and egg free baking, there are clearly still things for me to learn.

Mad scientist impressions aside, the macaroons were incredibly tasty. They are the moist, soft kind of macaroons that I love. With just a touch of melted white chocolate (dairy free, of course) and a few jellybeans, they make darling little nests. My kids loved them too. Kev is not a fan of coconut when it is all that he can taste, so they weren’t his favorite treat ever, but that’s ok. Oh, and of course we had to make one nest of dragon eggs, just for Malia. 😉

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.)