Making My Girl Her Birthday Cake

“Freddy!” my mom says. “Costco has great cakes! Just buy Abby one of those.”

No.

I don’t know how it started, but at some point I decided it was my job to make my wife’s birthday cake. Maybe during the pandemic. Everyone was baking too much then. Or maybe it’s because it’s the only thing I’m allowed to bake. I mean, yes I’m a grown man and could bake anything I like, but Abby is an enthusiastic baker and hyper-competitive. So God forbid I bake anything that takes away from dessert accolades. It’s just not worth the drama.

This year it’s coconut lemon cake. And yes I clarified. Abby wants a coconut cake with lemon features NOT a lemon-coconut cake or even a coconut-lemon cake.

tl;dr version ;)

And we’ll be Up North when I make this, which means a rental kitchen. Gotta bring my own pans and scale and mixer. Frick.

I started with Gemma Stafford because her recipes are idiot-proof and deadnuts reliable. She usually asks only that her bold bakers combine two sets of ingredients, wet and dry — -and Bob’s your uncle.

https://www.biggerbolderbaking.com/moist-coconut-cake-recipe/

But I noticed a discrepancy in the ingredients list that caused me to e-mail Ms. Stafford, who noted two cups of AP flour as 284 grams, rather than 240 grams, and I became interested in other recipes calling for a “reverse-cream” method. Instead of creaming sugar and butter together first, reverse creaming adds butter to flour and sugar and leavening agents. A guy on YouTube noted it to be marginally better, no more trouble, and that it made one’s batter relatively immune to over-mixing. Oh, and the finished cake sponge should have less of a dome, meaning less waste and less leveling. (I’ve never gotten a good result from a cake saw.)

Ope. That recipe called for coconut oil and sour cream, which I didn’t bring and wasn’t going out for. Not happening.

Gemma e-mailed me back at 4:30 a.m., which would make it 2:30 in California. I must’ve gotten under her skin questioning her maths. Anyhoo, she wrote that I may want to concentrate on “just reading the batter.” Yes, ma’am.

Gemma’s recipe called for two 8” springform pans. I had two 9” ones with a surface area of roughly 64 square inches each, and so I decided to multiply Gemma’s recipe by 1.25 and to convert it to a reverse-cream method, with added lemon. Phew! It felt good to have a plan.

I started with 213 grams of cake flour because some of the coconut cake recipes I looked at favored cake flour, and I didn’t want to take a third of a bag home. I made up the difference with AP flour and combined it with 400 grams of sugar (or two cups, not increasing to 500 grams because I wanted a semi-sweet cake and sweeter icing), and leavening. Instead of doing 1 ¼ tsps of sodium bicarbonate, I did one teaspoon of baking soda and one teaspoon of baking powder. See, I bought baking powder Wednesday night before I knew which recipe I’d use, and I didn’t want to take that home unopened. (1/4 tsp of baking soda equals one tsp of baking powder, and the recipe went up 25 percent.)

226 g + 57 g butter + not enough flour and maybe not enough sugar

I added the butter and used the hand mixer. I was going for sand. I got mud.

Not sand

I added more flour. Thirty grams. And again. Still mud. I finally got sand after a total of 480 grams of flour. That’s cool. That’s about the proportions from the coconut-oil/sour-cream recipe.

SAND!

Added five egg yolks and almost two cups of coconut. Now I’m supposed to add two more liquids. Instead of 10 ounces of buttermilk I did 18 grams of lemon zest, 1.5 tsp coconut extract, three ounces of coconut milk from a can, and seven ounces of regular milk with lemon juice to make home-made buttermilk. Except the blender in this rental is terrible, and the lemon zest came out chonky, which I realized after already blending it into the main batter. Rustic.

Google says this will add a hint of lemon without making a lemon cake.

For the five egg whites, there is an argument to be made to add cream of tartar, get it to stiff peaks, add a bit of sugar (Oh, what’s another 25 grams? Could even go another 100. Nah. Semi-sweet cake and sweet icing is the right answer.), and re-whip to medium peaks, hand mixing a quarter of the foam in then FOLDing in the remainder.

“You just fold it in!” (Cf. “Schitt’s Creek”)

Done.

Oven. Gemma said 32–35 minutes for the 8” springform. These went 50. That tracks.

These are kinda dome-y. Good crumb tho

Then you gotta make icing. Her nibs wants buttercream. She says a little cream cheese is OK. So that’s one brick of butter, a stick of unsalted butter, a brick of cream cheese, and the rest of the cream cheese left in the fridge door you don’t want to waste and almost a kilogram of powdered sugar and half a teaspoon of coconut extract and half a teaspoon of vanilla extract and half a teaspoon of orange blossom water because you added a couple capfuls right to the cake after the last fold of the reverse-creamed-therefore-supposedly-impossible-to-overmix batter because it’s sorta cool because no one ever expects orange blossom water, and you don’t overdo it so maybe only you will know, you know? And it’s probably a good way to meld the coconut and lemon flavors. Maybe.

Trim one cake. Halve another into a top and middle layer. Crumb coat. Make a dam of icing for holding in lemon curd.

For lemon curd there are recipes that call for zest and those that avoid zest, and you kinda want a little zest, but now you know the blender is janky. So you zest one lemon and blast that with the juice of enough lemons to get a little over four ounces of cloudy lemon juice with semi-pureed zest. Break three eggs. Reserve yolks. Drink three egg whites. Add two more eggs to 100 grams powdered sugar. (Maybe enough to throw this box away? No? OK. Gotta take home a little powdered sugar. Fine. Google also says that, for this purpose, 100 grams of powdered sugar or table sugar will be fine.) Combine 1.5 tsps Knox gelatin powder with a tablespoon of water in a ramekin. Put the beaters in the eggs, egg yolks, sugar, and lemon juice in the low-simmer bain marie. When the curd coats the back of a spoon, cut the heat and add like three quarters of the gelatin blob and a stick of frozen unsalted butter, precut into about eight pieces and fresh from the freezer. Keep mixing! Take the cake layers out of the freezer and make three lakes of warm lemon curd. Assemble layers. Really? The middle layer is frozen to the baking pan? Lemme flip that upside-down. Phew. More crumb coat. Refreeze. Finish off the frosting.

Hey William, how’s the lemon curd?

Toast two thirds of the remainder of the bag of coconut. Combine toasted and untoasted coconut. Burn your forearm on the skillet and coat the kitchen floor with several ounces of toasted and untoasted coconut.

He thinks he’s helping.

Cover the terrible icing job with what is left of said coconut and put this bitch back in the fridge.

Love can make up for a lack of refinment. In life and in cake.

Abby said we couldn’t have it for breakfast. She has principles.