The other night, as I was making a friend my favourite macaroni cheese, I had something of a spiritual epiphany. It came as I cracked open the yellow and green box of Tandaco stuffing mix and sprinkled its familiar, sodium-filled contents over my radioactively bright casserole: this is the food of my foremothers, I thought. I am communing with my ancestors right now. I felt an urge to put together a platter of toothpicked hors d’oeuvres made from cocktail onions and gherkins. I wanted to devil eggs, wear pantihose and appropriate dresses, bring a plate, refer to myself as Mrs Husbandsname Smalltown, crochet covers for the toilet paper, tell children to stand up straight, perm my hair to within an inch of its life. I wanted to boil something, oh, how I wanted to boil something.
My dear friend Jessie knows where I’m coming from. I realised this when, long ago, I went to her house for a party and discovered a table full of pineapple hedghogs and tinned asparagus spears wrapped in white bread. She makes a mean choc ripple cake and does not wear skirts above the knee. I love Jessie so, so when her birthday I wanted to make the sort of balls-out cake that would make my grandmother proud.
Which brings me to Amy Sedaris. Another dear friend gave me her cookbook for a birthday, and it’s amazing. Sort of a deranged cross between the Golden Hands magazines of my grandmother and the CWA cookbook, I knew it would be the perfect place to find an appropriate cake. The coconut cake I settled on, however, is certainly not any sponge cake my grandmother would recognise. It’s a genoise sponge layered with coconut creme anglaise and liberally spread with Swiss meringue buttercream. I have no internal filter when it comes to cakes. Genoise you say, Amy, the cake leavened only by eggs? Bring it on. Swiss meringue buttercream, a potentially E. Coli-laden icing of whisked egg whites, butter and sugar? I can take it.
And I did. But, be warned, if you’re going to try this cake it will take a few days, and you will, at one point, panic. One of the layers might not rise properly; you might get a spot of water in your egg whites that will prevent them from forming stiff peaks; and the recipe might be, well, a touch insane. I rather love Amy for her, shall we say, casually written recipes. Quantities are approximate, instructions hazy, and you get the feeling she asked her friends and family for recipes and published them as-is. Amy credits the recipe to Ayse Dizioglu of Polka Dot Cake Studio in NYC, saying it’s ‘the best she ever had,’ and it’s clear that Ayse gave Amy recipes for commercial quantities of creme anglaise and Swiss meringue. I halved both, and there’s still a container of creme anglaise in my fridge, so I’ve quartered the recipe for creme anglaise below. For the sake of your sanity, you really should make the creme anglaise and swiss meringue the night before you plan on assembling and serving; I baked off the cakes and did the icing the day of Jessie’s birthday dinner and afterwards felt a touch crazed.
But… oh my, oh how it was delicious. The icing was fluffy and rich without being too cloyingly sweet, the cakes perfect, the creme anglaise cool and coconutty. If there’s a birthday coming up and you want to make your grandmother proud and friends happy, set aside the time and do it.
Coconut Cake
Adapted from Amy Sedaris. Serves 8-10. Or five greedy people, forks in hand, giggling their way through ‘The Unborn‘
For the cakes:
- 6 large eggs
- 200g sugar
- 125g flour, sifted twice
- 100g butter, melted
- 1 tsp vanilla
Preheat the oven to 150 degrees C. Grease two 20cm round sandwich tins; flour them. Line the bottom with a circle of baking paper. Grease and flour that, too. Set aside. Melt the butter and let it cool while you get on with everything else.
Gently whisk together the eggs and sugar in a large heatproof bowl ’til combined, then set over a pan of simmering water and stir for 5-8 minutes, until the eggs are barely warm and look like bright syrup. Remove from heat, bust out the hand mixer, or stand mixer if you have more counter space and money than I, and start beating. You will need to beat for a long, long, long time, at least 10 minutes, though I believe I was there for at least 20. You’ll need to beat the eggs until the mixture is tripled in volume, thick and pale. Consult this video from Gourmet for more on the role of eggs in genoise.
Sprinkle in the flour a little at a time, folding thoroughly but very, very gently with a spatula through after each addition. I found streaks of flour in my mixture when I was pouring the mixture into the tins; don’t let that happen. Make sure you get right down to the bottom of the bowl with every turn of the spatula. Gently fold in the butter and vanilla.
Pour the mixture into prepared pans and gingerly transfer to the oven. I have a feeling the oven temperature specified was too low; Amy said it would take 20-25 minutes to bake, but it took me nearly 40. Regardless, rotate the pans after 20 minutes. This is important. The cake that drew the short straw and baked on the lower oven rack sunk a bit and took longer to bake than the one on the top rack. Cool in their tins on racks for 15 minutes, then gently tap out and cool for a bit longer.
Now I shall assume that you already made your icing and creme anglaise - recipes for both will follow. To put your cake together, lay four thick strips of baking paper on your cake board or plate, so the edges of the board are covered but there’s a little square at the centre. This is so you can get icing and coconut over everything, then pull out the baking paper, leaving everything clean and nice and grandmother-approved. Carefully centre your least-attractive cake layer on your cake board or plate, then spoon the creme anglaise into the middle of it.
Amy advised piping a ring of buttercream around the edge of the bottom layer to keep the filling in place, but my bottom cake had sunk a little and, besides, my pastry bag and tips are out of commission right now. Centre the second layer on top…
… and feel like a wo/man whose children shall rise up and call her/him blessed (see how I didn’t alienate the dudes in the audience?). Using an offset spatula, ice the sides and top of the cake with your icing. As will be discussed, I decided to tint mine a gentle pink, but it came out the colour of sunburn, lending my cake the appearance of a sunburned, cellulitey arse for a while. At least until I pressed the toasted coconut into it. Then it looked like a sunburned, cellulitey, hairy arse. Pull out the strips of baking paper and feel pleased.
For the creme anglaise:
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1/2 cup well-shaken coconut milk
- 1/4 cup cream
- 60g sugar
- 40g cornflour
- 1 egg yolk
- 1 whole egg
- 10g butter
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp coconut extract
Combine milk, coconut milk, cream and half the sugar in a small saucepan and bring to the kind of boil that simmers delicately about the edges. A lady’s boil, if you will.
Whisk together cornstarch, other half of the sugar, yolk, egg and vanilla until the mixture whitens and no lumps remain. Add a small amount of boiled milk to the eggs to temper, then pour the tempered egg mixture into the pot with the rest of the milk mixture and cook over a low heat. Stir constantly with a spatula until the mixture thickens and looks like custard.
Pour the mixture through a sieve into a mixing bowl, and briskly stir in the butter and coconut extract until the pastry cream is smooth. Transfer to a small container, press a piece of glad wrap onto the surface and fridge until you’re ready to use it.
For the icing:
- 120g of egg whites. I used four out of my stash of frozen eggwhites, so I’d say four eggwhites is about right
- 225g caster sugar
- 300g butter, room temperature, cut into small pieces. That’s right, there is a *hell* of a lot of butter in this
- 1 tsp coconut extract
Stir together the egg whites with the sugar in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water, until you can no longer feel any sugar granules in the eggwhites and a thermometer reads 140 degrees F/60 degrees C. Remove from heat, wipe away any condensation around the bowl, and bust out the hand mixer/stand mixer again. Beat until the meringue holds stiff. Add butter piece by piece, beating well after each addition. At some point I typically switch from hand mixer to spatula to make sure everything is combined. The key is to keep beating. It may split or begin to look like one’s thighs on the first day of summer, but persevere. Add the coconut extract at some point, and food colouring if using. Transfer to a container and fridge ’till you’re ready to put the cake together.
