I’m over the moon about this vegan coconut cake! It came out like a dream.
It has heaps of coconut flavor as well as texture from two cups of dessicated coconut in the cake batter. And then the frosting has a bit of naughty coconut flavor via a quarter cup of coconut rum!
It’s gorgeous and it’s super easy to make too!
I had a minor snafu at first because when I was first trying to formulate the recipe I knew I wanted to put actual coconut in the batter, but I kept on thinking of it as a wet ingredient, which I know (now!) was silly!
So I was trying to replace some of the wet ingredients thinking that the coconut, being dessicated, would surely (or at least, possibly) break down in some way during the baking process and then leave me with a cake that was too wet.
Of course that didn’t happen and I had a cake a that was way too dry! So then I realized what I’m sure all you clever people already knew – of course it’s a dry ingredient because it’s like nuts, it’s a dry ingredient until such time as you process it into something like coconut butter, and then it becomes a wet ingredient, but if you don’t process it, it’s a dry ingredient, like putting nuts into a cake.
So then I stopped trying to compensate for it and used enough coconut oil and coconut milk to create enough moisture for my cake not to come out like a dry brick and then the beauty happened!
I will say though that, as you can see above, the batter is still quite dry, and this is because there are two cups of dessicated coconut that go into the batter, so it thickens the batter up a lot.
As you can see above, the cakes come out quite firm on the tops, I would even say a little ‘crispy’ I was comparing them to cookies. But don’t be put off, it works.
The dessicated coconut bakes into the cake but in the same way that if you added crushed walnuts to a carrot cake they would add delicious crunch to the cake, this adds a crunchy coconut texture and flavor to each bite.
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