Coconut Cake... How I love thee...

I love coconut cake. It has been awhile since I had one- rather, a good one. I was looking at a favorite recipe blog- Tracey's Culinary Adventures and there in front of my face was a glorious and beautiful coconut cake. I had to pin it to my recipe board and knew I'd be making it for Easter.

MMMM and soooo festive!

My version was different from hers. The cake was the same- a basic white cake, but the filling was strawberries and strawberries jam and the frosting was homemade cream cheese frosting. The original recipe is from another source and called for cream of coconut. Having never heard of it, I decided to skip it. When would I use it again???? It lead me to find a new recipe for cream cheese frosting (which was truly outstanding!).

I set out to bake it Saturday night (just before Easter). That day was busy and I had run all over tarnation (just a phrase I grew up with and still have no clue what/where tarnation is but I guess that's the point). The recipe called for 2 9" round cake pans. I had them. I found them buried in the back of the cabinet. I pulled them out to see they had rusted. I was NOT going to go out again. I decided to dump all of the mix into the springform pans I have. Yes, it's not 2 separate smaller pans, but it works. i figured I'd just cut the cake in half to add the filling.  That's what I did; however, it took almost 1 1/2 hours to bake the cake all the way through. The next day I realized the flaw in this- the bottom/corners were hard and kind of dry. Boo!

I proceeded. We can cut that part off. I sliced the cake in half. Put down the jam then added the sliced berries and top of the cake. Next was frosting the cake. I waited for the frosting to get close to room temp for easier spreading and away I went. Then I patted on the coconut.

Oh YUM!!!

This was, in my opinion, a treat to eat on Easter Sunday with family. I took it to 2 different family functions. Half for 1 family and half for the other. Everyone who ate it said it was good. I thought it was pretty good for my first ever from scratch cake. The strawberries in the middle were great and the cream cheese frosting was some of the best I'd ever had.

Click the following for links to the recipes.
Frosting
Coconut Cake recipe