Chocolate Coconut Cake or LOLCake

So yeah, cake is not my strong area in the kitchen. I think this is the second time I've tried to make a cake from scratch, and this one turned out twice as good as the previous.

Meet Lily. She was bugging the hell out of me at the grocery store yesterday to buy a coconut, so the price seemed reasonable (even if a little high) and it would be an educational experience for both of us. While I was draining the water and peeling away the shell I was pondering what to do with this coconut since none of us seemed eager to just eat it plain. I thought....cake...

After searching the web for some coconut cake recipes, I decided I didn't want to have to make a special trip to the grocery store and buy a bunch of ingredients like heavy whipping cream or cream cheese that would just end up upsetting my stomach anyway.

Couldn't I just add coconut to a regular chocolate cake? I've got flour, eggs, oil, baking soda, baking powder, cocoa powder etc...I could find a simple from-scratch recipe somewhere, but where? Ah, the Hershey's web-site for the cocoa powder.

First, greasing and flouring my 2 9" round pans. These hand-me-down pans have seen better days...probably back in the 1970's.

Lily sifts all of the dry ingredients into a bowl: AP flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda and powder, and salt.

Lily is fascinated by the way you can use the lid of the baking powder can to level off the teaspoon. Quite frankly, after 30 years I still am.

And because all of the dry ingredients didn't all fit into the sifter, we have to combine them the old fashioned way to ensure even distribution.

 Next we put our eggs, milk, vegetable oil, and vanilla into the mixing bowl and whirr it up.

Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Be careful not to over-mix or you get mousse instead of cake. At the end, mix in a cup of boiling water. I thought that part was kinda weird.

Cake mix goes from the mixing bowl into the 2 greased pans and into the oven at 350 for 30-35 minutes.

Here's what ours came out looking like. So far, so good.

While the cakes are cooling, we made frosting by melting butter, adding cocoa powder, adding milk and powdered sugar, and then finishing it with a little vanilla (we forgot the vanilla, not that you'd notice).

These cakes were under-baked. Or actually, they were baked unevenly, my stupid oven. As a result, they didn't happily come out of the pans.

 I put a small layer of frosting on the top of the bottom round and then stacked the next round on top. From here I put all the frosting in the middle of the top cake and began trying to smooth it out on top and down the sides. I suck at this big time.

And to top it all off we put small crumbs of coconut fresh from the food processor. Awesome!

So, that's that. I was a little frustrated and a little disappointed that it didn't come out picture-perfect, but at least Lily and I had a fun time this afternoon and she got to see a real coconut. Normally, I list the recipe at this point, but trust me, you don't want it.

Oh, as for the cake - it's sickeningly sweet, but edible in small doses.

I'd like to hear about tragedies you've had in your kitchen lately - feel free to comment!