So I’ve been given another opportunity to make a wedding cake, this time for a friend’s wedding in a few months time. I’m super excited to try out some new recipes and you will get to follow me on the wedding cake journey for the next few months, whoop whoop. So one of the layers that I suggested was a coconut and lime cake, one I’ve never made before, but sure it can’t be that hard, right? Famous last words, I will never learn, haha. I found this recipe on……..yes you guessed it, BBCGoodFood, just can’t beat it.
I preheated the oven to 170C (fan) and lined and buttered two 20cm baking tins. I shredded 200g of creamed coconut, which I bought at a deadly Asian supermarket in Dublin last week.
Now this recipe called for literally throwing all the ingredients into one bowl, I’m always very wary of this kind of method but I said I’d try it anyways. I mixed 200g of caster sugar, 200g of softened butter, 4 beaten eggs, 200g of self-raising flour, 1 tsp of baking powder, 2 tbsp of milk and 100g of the shredded coconut in a bowl until it was a smooth batter. I spooned the batter into the two tins and popped them into the oven for 20 minutes.
Unfortunately the cakes did not rise as much as I would have liked, so I mixed up the batter the way I normally would.
I creamed the butter and sugar, added the eggs one at a time and mixed well. I sifted in the self-raising flour and baking powder and stirred it in with a spatula followed by the shredded coconut. Then I popped them back into the oven, at 190C, standard oven, one at a time for 20 minutes. They did brown on top a lot faster, which was annoying, but they rose a lot better than the first cake. I left them to cool on a wire rack and got started on the buttercream icing.
I put the remaining 100g of shredded coconut into a bowl, thank God that I bought two packets last week. I put the zest and juice of two limes in too and gave it all stir. I put it in the microwave for 30 seconds until the coconut had melted. I mixed 100g of butter with 140g of icing sugar and then stirred the coconut and lime mixture into it.
Like many of the comments had mentioned, the icing had become very runny so I added another 60g of icing sugar and it was much better. After tasting it I felt it needed more of a zesty kick so I stirred in the zest of another lime, zingy.
I didn’t have enough desiccated coconut so I ground up 100g of toasted coconut flakes instead. Turns out I only needed about a quarter of this amount after all.
I filled the inside of the cake and then iced the outside and top. I covered the outside with the ground coconut, very neatly as you can see from my photo, haha. Just a little tip for doing this, and for myself in future too. Once you ice the inside and the sides of the cake, just roll the cake threw the coconut and then ice the top, hindsight’s a great thing.
The end result was quite delicious, there was just the right amount of icing and the cake itself wasn’t too sweet, something I was a little worried about with so much coconut in the mixture. I don’t think there’s really any need for the extra coconut on the outside other than adding a little aesthetic twist to it, it’s less hassle without it to be honest. Oh and the first cakes were sandwiched together with some jam, no waste here, haha.
I’m off to Amsterdam for a few days tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll be whipping up some Dutch recipes in the next two weeks, watch this space………
Fernweh with T 