Southern Coconut Cake with Silk Meringue Buttercream

My brother loves coconut cake.  I’ll have to make this for him sometime when we’re together and I have all of the ingredients.  So if you’re reading this, Den, and planning a visit, I need coconut extract and fresh grated coconut.  I’ve been unable to find coconut extract in Poland, and the only coconut on the shelf is desiccated.  Fortunately, they do have coconut milk on the Asian food aisle in the market.

The actual cake is a cinch to make.  My pans aren’t 2 inches high, so I filled my 1.5 inch pans and put a bit of batter into an additional small pan.  It prevents the overflow problem and gives us a small cake to sample at home while sharing the big cake with Ed’s coworkers.

Reading about the buttercream was intimidating.  It does involve 3 separate recipes – creme anglaise, Italian meringue, and to put it all together, the completed silk meringue buttercream.   Making it wasn’t as bad as I expected.  You just have to do it.   Yeah, I’m pretty cocky now that I have a 220 volt handheld mixer.

I made a sincere effort at re-hydrating the dried coconut, but it wasn’t what it should have been.  Even though it was missing some key ingredients, Ed and I still enjoyed our little cake, and I’m not worried about my reputation when the big one goes off to the air base.

We’ll be in Paris next weekend, so I’m trying to decide what to do for my “free choice” before we go.

Unlike my other blog posts, as part of the Heavenly Cake Bakers, I don’t post recipes from this book on the Internet. One of the reasons for this baking group is to encourage readers to purchase the cookbook. That strategy worked on me! After follow the group’s baking adventures for a couple of months, I ordered a copy from Amazon because I wanted join in.

Lois Britton

An accountant by trade and a food blogger since 2009, Lois Britton fell in love with Polish cuisine during the years she lived in Poznań, Poland. As the creator of PolishHousewife.com,  she loves connecting readers with traditional Polish recipes. Lois has a graduate certificate in Food Writing and Photography from the University of South Florida. She is the author of The Polish Housewife Cookbook, available on Amazon and on her website.