Coconut Layer Cake
I absolutely love coconut. The moment I saw this cake I knew I needed an excuse to make it. eat it.
This cake was impressive and delicious, but not too difficult to make–my favorite kind of cake!
I was so impressed by how flat the layers baked! No doming in the oven meant no leveling the layers before stacking.
The cake part of this recipe calls for canned cream of coconut, which is NOT the same thing as canned coconut cream or just scraping the cream out of a can of coconut milk.
Cream of coconut is a highly sweetened coconut milk, most commonly used to make piña colada drinks. If you look for it at the grocery store be sure to look near the drink mixers, not near the canned coconut milk.
The coconut cream cheese frosting is basically what dreams are made of. It is so delicious. My only complaint with the frosting is that since it is a cream cheese frosting it ended up a lot slipperier than my usual buttercream when it came time to stack the cake.
It wasn’t impossible, but if you’re used to stacking cakes using buttercream you will probably notice a difference. My cake layers slid around a bit and I had to focus on keeping them in line.
To remedy the super-softness of the frosting, I put the completed cake in the refrigerator until we were ready to eat it, which wound up being about 3 hours. Best idea I’ve ever had, the cake held its shape, the layers stayed in place, and the frosting firmed up just enough to be able to stop sliding around.
The cake itself is super light and super fluffy, but that also means it’s super crumbly and super difficult to get a clean slice!
This cake is a must-try, in my opinion!
Coconut Layer Cake, Food Network Magazine April 2019.
