Cake-A-Month - January - Post 3

Fret not, I haven't forgotten you! I haven't quite gotten to that point where the posts slowly dwindle and die (give me another month for that to happen!). I haven't posted because so far, there's being nothing to post! I haven't been able to get started on January's cake because the weather has been absolutely terrible here! Here in Australia we've been going through one of the worst heatwaves in recorded history causing some of the worst bushfire conditions we've ever seen, suffice it to say I wasn't exactly thrilled at the idea of turning on the oven and heating the house up even more!! Working with fondant in this weather isn't exactly a welcome idea either!

So today was the first day with cooler weather and according to the weather forecasts it wasn't going to last for long so I quickly grabbed the chance to bake the cakes for the January cake.

I used Beyond Buttercream's white cake recipe, but made a coconut variation as per her instructions. I made a couple of variations though:
Instead of cake flour I used plain flour mixed with a couple of tablespoons of corn flour. Cake flour is quite hard to come by in Australia and when you do find it it's significantly more expensive than regular flour. According to Google using corn flour in plain flour is a popular substitute so I figured I'd go with that.
I used butter instead of shortening since it's also difficult to come by shortening in Australia. The only readily available shortening is made 100% from transfats and is pretty gross.
As per Beyond Buttercreams instructions for the coconut variation I substituted the milk and sour cream for coconut milk and added a handful of desiccated coconut.

When I was making the batter for the cake I was a bit worried. The batter was reeeeally runny, despite her instructions saying that the batter should be thickening up. The butter also wasn't completely mixing through. Her instructions said to add the liquid and butter all at once but the batter ended up too runny to properly mix the butter through. I felt like the sour cream shouldn't have been substituted for coconut milk since the liquid content of the two are drastically different. I went ahead with the recipe anyway and decided to see what happens.

Chunky, soup-like texture.

While the cakes were baking I got even more worried. The cakes were rising strangely, one side would rise while the other side stayed at the same level, the top was bubbling away like it was boiling on the stove and was very crispy looking at the same time. It was very very odd looking and I sorta gave in to the fact that the cakes had failed and I would have to start over again.

The best of the 3 cakes. Crispy appearance to the top.

Then when the cakes were finished and I went to turn them out onto cooling trays, something amazing happened.
While the tops of the cakes were all strange and crispy appearing, the bottoms of the cakes looked PERFECT! The texture seemed right, they were slightly golden in appearance and didn't seem any different from any other cake I would have baked. I then realised that the strange appearance of the tops were because all the desiccated coconut had risen to the top of the cake during the baking process. I still had to taste them though - just to test, of course!! ;)

Perfection!

Mmmmm, these cakes are sooo good. I was a bit surprised at the inside texture of the cake, the inside is very moist and slightly...dense?? but in a really good way (I know it sounds totally weird!), sorta like the inside of brownies. I think it would actually work really well under fondant, it won't dry out like the Christmas cake did, and should be firm enough to hold up under the fondant. They actually reminded me a lot of the wedding cake at a friends wedding. We all really loved the cake and were eating it for weeks afterwards (they were living with us at the time) and we all commented on the strange but delicious texture of the cake - moist, but slightly fudge-like. Maybe the baker uses the same recipe?? Lol

I'm going to have to bake more tomorrow, I somehow ended up eating all of them in the testing process, woops! I'll let you know how tomorrows attempt goes :)