This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosure policy.
I’ve had cake on the brain lately. Maybe that’s because I’ve been trying not to eat cake, and so all I can think about is eating cake. But also, around here it’s cake season (to everything there is a season).
There are First Communions in spring, which my grandmother Alice Abowd always graced with her specialty cakes. There was a piped cross cake, and a coconut lamb whose molds we still have (perfect for my nephew’s Communion cake this week). There used to be spring cake-walks at our parish carnival, too. You’d walk the circle until the music stopped playing and if you were standing on the number drawn from a hat, you won a cake. Brilliant.
And there is Mother’s Day, a cake-worthy event if there ever was one. One particular Mother’s Day probably 15 years ago, maybe more but I can’t go there, my sister and I headed back to Michigan from Chicago to celebrate with Mom. Dad was with us back then, and my brother was in Michigan too. We loaded the car with over-the-top treats, including a big bucket filled with the most gorgeous roses I’d ever seen. They were a perfect shade of fuchsia and the underside of the petals was chalky pink; they blossomed into big, loose ruffles that filled both hands put together around them. I’d seen a few of the roses in the floral display at Treasure Island grocery store, and asked what they were, and could they get me several dozen? I swore I would never forget the name of that rose, so that I could always ask for it by name (and now: name forgotten).
There was also a Mother’s Day cake whose name was never forgotten. It was a tall, three-layered, handcrafted beauty steadied on the floor in the back of the car in a big blue box from Tiffany. A stately coconut cake was worthy of that box. But this coconut cake? I’d rather forget it and remember the roses. But nobody will let me.
Imagine the white tower of a cake on the kitchen table at home, a proud display of daughterly love on Mother’s Day. Here was a confection of the highest order. Beautiful inside too, layers of meringue icing that stood firm and grand. We sliced into the cake immediately, all formalities and any right-before-dinner hesitancy aside.
The table was pretty quiet as we forked up the thick bites. I looked up from mine and caught my brother and sister mouthing something to each other. What? I said, What what!!
They threw down their forks, I kid you not, and told me in the dramatic terms they are experts at that my cake was inedibly dry. And flavorless. Dry, flavorless, and what’s for dinner anyway?
Fine. I agreed. It was not a good cake. It was a vain cake, pretty to look at with no character underneath it all (my Valentine’s Day Cake, now that is both pretty to look at and delicious). I was so irritated at Martha Stewart for giving me such a fail that I still fear a misfire every time I try something of hers (but then there were these, and the world was set straight). It’s something none of us can forget, not unlike that one time when I was a kid and got so irritated by all of the sibling harassment that I threw the TV remote at my brother (I’m sorry, I really am), and still today we’re both stunned that I did it. Same with the cake. That stunningly bad display of bait-and-switch, of looks pretty/tastes bad still comes up, and its haunting has made me less of a cake baker than I would otherwise be, I’m sure of it.
So here you go. I’m done running from the coconut cake, or any white cake for that matter. Done accepting that they taste bad (often of raw flour, or something like that). I’ve tried many if not all of the approaches to a coconut cake, and this one is a winner for its deep coconut flavor and, of course, its moistness (if that means accepting a scoop of shortening, so be it). I feel certain Grandma Abowd would approve for her lamb cake, certain I’d pick this one if my number came up in a cake-walk, and positive I’ve finally made good on a cake worthy of spring cake season.
