TWD: Coconut Tea Cake

In the past week I’ve had a string of unfortunate incidents which have resulted in either a huge mess or minor injury to myself.  For example, last week I dropped a gallon of milk as I was pulling it from the top shelf of the fridge.  It crashed to the floor, the cap flew off and milk splattered several feet in every direction.  That was fun to clean up 🙂  I’ve also dropped an open bag of popcorn kernels on my kitchen floor and spilled an entire container of powder in the bathroom.  I’m not usually such a klutz, I swear.  When I set out to make this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie selection, coconut tea cake, Sunday night at about 10:30 pm (good things rarely happen when I start baking that late at night), I kept the streak alive by injuring myself within the first 10 minutes.  Despite shaking my can of coconut milk before opening it, I lifted the lid only to find that it was completely separated.  I grabbed a spoon in one hand to stir it up and something in me decided it would be a good idea to grab the sharp edge of the lid in the other hand to secure the can.  Ouch!  I wound up with a nice slice in my middle finger and while it wasn’t terribly painful, I did have to find a way to stop the bleeding before I could continue with the cake.  This isn’t the first time I’ve sliced my finger open (rewind to an incident with a mandoline a few months ago) so I’ve learned that if I wrap a paper towel around my finger and then a little sandwich bag, I can secure the contraption with a rubber band and continue on my way.  It’s cumbersome, but it works!  Anyway, I hope this is the last in my string of accidents and that it’ll be smooth sailing going forward…

This recipe makes a full size bundt cake and as usual, I scaled back.  I love when a recipe is easy to scale, and this one was a breeze!  No messy fractions or partial eggs necessary.  I made only 1/4 of the recipe and divided the batter among the tins of my mini bundt pan.  Dorie provided a lot of flavor variations this week to go along with the coconut and I went with orange, though I’d like to try lime another time too.  I also added the optional dark rum.  The batter includes shredded coconut and mine was both sweetened and toasted, which are the dark bits you can see in the cake in the photo below.  The quarter recipe yielded three mini bundts for me and my baking time was about 18 minutes.  I greased the pan well, but I still had a bit of trouble getting the bundts to release from the pan.  I did eventually get them out without incident (by gently prying them with a toothpick), but I’ll be curious to hear if folks have trouble with the full size bundts. 

I topped one of my minis with some of the leftover raspberry sauce from the pavlova I made on Sunday and left the others plain.  I tried a bite of the cake on Monday morning and I wasn’t all that impressed.  Though they were moist, the cakes were also dense.  The coconut flavor was pretty subtle and even the bits of shredded coconut didn’t add much coconut flavor – they were more of a textural addition.  I went back to the cake on Monday evening and tried a second bite and wow, had it ever improved for me texturally!  It was still moist, but now instead of a dense cake, I found a fluffy one!  I’ll definitely enjoy eating the remainder of that mini and I’ve tucked the other 2 in my freezer for another day.  Many thanks to Carmen of Carmen Cooks, who selected the coconut tea cake this week.  You can find the recipe on her blog or on page 194 of Baking: From My Home to Yours.