My Coconut Failure
- Posted by Melissa on July 9th, 2008 filed in daily life
So we are having a reception at my boyfriend’s aunt’s place next month sometime and I elected to do a dessert reception, which sounded good because we can basically just make a lot of the stuff ourselves and serve coffee and iced tea or something like that. At least, that sounded good to me.
This weekend while we were up in Iowa with his mom and sister, I watched a program with his mom on the Food Channel, which is basically a show dedicated to the noxious turd chef Bobby Flay, who seeks out amateur chefs and does his best to demoralize and humiliate them as much as possible. If they make a traditional hog roast, he has to one-up them by tacking “chipotle” on to it. I think he is basically a terrible person and I hate his egotistical steamroller campaign of cooking terror.
But anyway, one of the episodes of this show was about coconut cake, and this was this nice guy from the Carolinas who made a great looking coconut cake and Bobby Flay burst this poor man’s coconut cake bubble and anyway, coconut cake just started sounding awfully good to me. I found a recipe for a coconut cake in one of my cookbooks and I did a test run of it tonight and it was an utter failure as far as I was concerned. I was really disappointed. It didn’t rise well, the texture was too dense, and the icing recipe was frankly disgusting. It was one of those boiled sugar icings where you whip the caramelized sugar into beaten egg whites and it was pretty dreadful.
I’m going to leave it in the break room at work (without my name on it) and hope that it gets cannibalized by the unsuspecting, because while the cake itself is not so awful as it could be, it certainly isn’t worth the calories. So if I want coconut cake, it’s back to the drawing board. I may make a trip to the library tomorrow or Friday night and see what I can find. On Saturday my crafty friend and I are going to test the cheesecake recipe I have to make sure it will work out okay. So maybe I’ll be able to test another coconut cake then. I hope I’m not just screwed because my countertop oven situation is not ideal.
Here is a picture of my depressing cake.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:21 am
I’m sorry your cake sucks! I hate it when recipes suck. People shouldn’t publish sucky recipes. Anyway, in the hopes of cutting down on the trial and error portion of finding dessert recipes, http://smittenkitchen.com/ has lots of dessert entries. I’ve made two recipes off this site and both were fabulous. The peanut butter brownie recipe I made from here would probably not look out of place at a reception, and there are tons of other recipes for classy-looking desserts. The “sweet” category has the dessert foods.
July 13th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
You know (as much as it sucks that your cake didn’t turn out as well as you would have liked!), I totally agree with the whole “it’s not worth the calories” statement. If I’m going to eat cake, it’s going to be GOOD cake (and WORTH those calories)!
I have no doubt that your co-workers consumed it, though! :)
July 15th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
7 - great blog find! I am totally nuts for the cherry upside down cornmeal cake. I don’t know if I’ll wind up making it for the reception but I have GOT to make it some other time. Thanks!
Zan - Yeah, I almost couldn’t believe people liked it as much as they did! The people to finish it off left a thank you note - which I don’t get since it was completely mediocre. Those poor people - if that thing impressed them I wish they could have tried one of my good cakes!