Nuts for coconut!

Ah the power of advertising. A few weeks ago I saw an ad in a magazine for coconut cake, and have been obsessed with making one ever since.

For this one, I chose strawberry cake made with applesauce instead of oil (you can substitute it directly -- 1:1). That turned out fine.

The filling, however, did not. I found a recipe online (btw I would avoid cooks.com -- the recipes there don't have enough info and don't always work right) that included cream of coconut, milk, sugar and butter. Sounds easy enough, like frosting, right? No. It sat on my stove for 40 minutes and never thickened, even after I desperately started throwing cornstarch in. I had to DUMP IT DOWN THE DRAIN.

This is my first time baking where I had to completely toss something because it wasn't turning out. Frown!

So I found a more traditional coconut cream cheese filling recipe that I figured couldn't fail. I taste-tested it just to be sure. Smile!

I also tried my hand at multiple layers:


We'll see how that goes. Layer cakes like this usually get all crumbly when you try to frost them, so I sprayed a light layer of PAM before frosting and it seemed to work OK.

Topped it off with a low-sugar frosting and fresh Peeps. Hoppy Easter!