Giant Coconut Layer Cake

I had never made a coconut cake before, but it sounded yummy (and it was!). Thanks, Tori.

I spent a very long time online searching for the "perfect" recipe. I quickly came to the conclusion that no one bakes cakes from scratch anymore, since the majority of the recipes started with "for cake, follow the directions on the box"! The recipe I ended up using was a hybrid of 2 that I found. Something called Peninsula Grill Giant Coconut Layer Cake sounded wonderful, but I thought the filling would be quite bland. I finally found a recipe on cooks.com for a cake with pineapple filling, which sounded really, really good,and I went with that.

It was an easy cake to make. Just cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs and then the flour. Divide the batter into 3 pans and bake.

My favorite part was making the pineapple filling. You just put everything into a saucepan and gently cook for a couple of minutes. The fun part was watching all that "stuff" gradually thicken into a creamy, rich filling. My hunch is that the eggs do the thickening, since the main ingrediants are predominently sugar and canned pineapple.

Once the cakes and the filling had cooled I got to put the layers together and make the frosting.

Half of the filling and 1/3 of a cup of coconut went on the first layer, followed by the 2nd layer, the rest of the filling and more coconut. The third layer and then on to the frosting!

It truly amazes me that a simple mixture of cream cheese, butter and powdered sugar can taste so outrageously good. Not onlt that, but it was fluufy and creamy. A miracle! The hardest part was getting the coconut onto the cake once it was frosted. The directions said to "sprinkle" the coconut on the frosting and gently press it into the cake. It felt more like a combination of plastering something with my barehands and really messy finger painting. I sort of slapped a handful of coconut onto the sides of the cake - there was coconut all over the counter, the cake and me. But it definately was worth the mess.!

I went to a dinner party that night with some friends from my book group and I took the cake in lieu of a bottle of wine. To say it was a hit is an understatement - everybody there raved about it. There was not a morsel left!

This wasn't a terribly expensive cake to make, but I doubt I'd make it on a regular basis- it has almost a day's worth of calories and enough fat and sugar to put you WAY over your daily recommended intake. But for a special occaison, where everybody's overeating :), it'd be perfection.