Cinco de Mayo Cake

I’ve been a bad blogger lately. I’m sorry friends, I really am.

I’ve been busy. Like, super busy, but thats not a good excuse, everybody’s busy.

I’ve been working lots and lots, and I’ve been eating a lot of take out. I’ve been getting home from work at 6 and going to bed at 9. I haven’t been much fun thats for sure.

BUT I did at least put on a pretty dress and an alarming amount of under eye concealer and go to a Cinco de Mayo Party on Friday. I ate tacos and caught up with girlfriends who I have been neglecting along with my blog. And I made a cake.

It was a good cake.

I had a bunch of coconut buttercream still in my fridge from making these macarons, and so I thought that was thematic enough and made a coconut cake. I was going to frost it with the straight up buttercream but then it wasn’t quite right so I added in some cream cheese a la the Barefoot Contessa. But then it was to heavy so I added some gelatin and folded in some whip cream. The result of this experiment was delicious, and light and very flavourful almost closer to a mousse or a bavarois then icing. So good in fact that’s what I ate for dinner Thursday night.

I was feeling quite pleased with myself until I realized I didn’t take into account that the frosting would set up because of the gelatin and so I put it in the fridge not very smooth thinking I would let it set a little before smoothing it perfectly, but it never did. Fortunately I had a a couple ripe mangos so I peeled them into slivers and put them on top. And then it was very festive, and very pretty, and very delicious.

I’ve toned down the icing a bit, you don’t need to make the buttercream, just a regular cream cheese frosting will do just fine.

Coconut Cake

2 1/4 cup AP Flour

1 1/2 cup Sugar

2 tsp Baking Powder

1/4 cup Butter, Melted

6 Egg Yolks

1/4 cup Water

3/4 cup Coconut Milk, unsweetened

10 Egg Whites

Mix your flour, baking powder, salt and half the sugar together

Mix in all ingredients except egg whites and the remaining sugar.

In the bowl of your standing mixer, or with a good amount of arm muscle, beat the egg whites until frothy.

Then slowly add in the sugar, a tablespoon at a time until stiff peaks form and the meringue is beautiful and glossy.

Fold the whites into the rest of the batter being careful not to over mix. Pour into your prepared pan.

Bake for about 45 minutes, or until an inserted skewer comes out with only a few moist crumbs and it looks like this:

Cool and cut the cake into 3 horizontal layers.

Coconut Syrup

1/2 cup Coconut Milk

1/3 cup Sugar

Zest of half a lime,

Mix all ingredients in a pot and bring to a simmer until all the sugar is dissolved, cool.

Cream Cheese, Coconut, Icing-Mousse

120z Cream Cheese

1/2 cup Butter, Room Temperature

3 Cups Icing Sugar

1 cup Shredded Unsweetened Coconut

1/2 cup Coconut Milk

1 cup 35% Cream, whipped to stiff peaks

Cream butter and sugar together. Slowly add cream cheese piece by piece until all combined. Mix in coconut.

Soak gelatin in coconut milk for 5 minutes.

In a small pot heat them until the gelatin has dissolved.

Slowly add the gelatin mixture into the cream cheese mix.

Fold the cream into the frosting. Use immediately.

Immediately get the bottom of layer of cake onto your cake stand or plate.

Brush with the coconut milk mixture and then spoon on a big glop of the icing.

Keep going with all the layers.

And then do the outside!

Then smooth it as best as you can, I mised that step as you can see.

Take  a couple mangos and peel them with a vegetable peeler. And then keep peeling them into strips.

Then artfully twist and twirl the mango on to the the top of the cake and the bottom around the edges.

I then grated some lime zest around the edges and put some flowers on the top. Et voila!