Strawberry Coconut Cake

I like to think up of some new cake flavours every time I have to bake for someone. So this time when I wanted to make an anniversary cake for my sister in law, I went trolling for ideas. My sister in law had loved the Coconut Pineapple cake I had made earlier, so I thought of tweaking the idea a bit. I like strawberries, and I like coconut, so thought how about a coconut strawberry cake! The cake turned out really good, better than I expected.

In this cake, I also wanted to experiment with chocolate collar and chocolate hearts. The theme was anniversary, so I thought of embedding pink hearts in the cake collar. The cake was gorgeous, and tasted fab as well! The icing was all fresh cream, so lushhhh!!

Makes an 8 inch cake

How to make the cake:

Ingredients:

For the cake:

Self raising flour, sifted – 250 gms

Caster sugar – 200 gms

Butter – 200 gms

Medium eggs – 4

Coconut milk – 250 gms

Dessicated coconut (unsweetened) – 1 1/2 cups

Strawberry flavouring – 2-3 teaspoons

Strawberries, chopped – 3

For icing:

Strawberry Jam – 2 tablespoons

Fresh double cream – 700 gms

Strawberries, chopped – 4

Icing Sugar – 2 tablespoons

Mascarpone cheese (optional) – 2 tablespoons (I use this to make the icing more stable, but can be skipped if the cake is going to be consumed immediately.)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C and grease and dust two 8 inch cake pans. Keep aside.
2. Put together the coconut milk and dessicated coconut in a pan and bring almost to a boil, stirring well all the time. Mix well together, remove from heat and set aside to cool completely. Do not add to the batter if still hot, this can cause the eggs to start cooking.
3. Cream together the butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Add one egg at a time, mixing well after each addition.
4. Add about a tablespoon of the flour to this mixture to avoid curdling, but even if the mixture curdles, don’t worry too much, it will be fine.
5. Take the sifted flour in a big bowl and fold in the coconut mixture and beaten eggs, butter and sugar mixture till well incorporated.
6. Add the chopped strawberries and strawberry essence. Fold to incorporate, making sure the whole batter doesn’t deflate.
7. Pour the batter in the prepared cake tins, and bake at 180 degrees C for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean.
8. Take the cakes out of the oven and leave to cool down for 10 minutes. Then invert on wire racks to cool completely.
9. For the icing, beat the fresh cream with the sugar in a chilled bowl till stiff peaks form. The bowl and beaters should be in the fridge for at least 30 minutes for the cream to beat best. Keep an eye out on the cream as it very quickly turns to butter after stiff peaks are formed.
10. In a separate bowl, take the cream cheese and just mix it with a spoon to soften it. Fold in the beaten cream to it.
11. To ice the cake, take one of the 2 sponges and spread the jam on it like in the picture here: 
12. Spread some of the whipped cream icing on top of the jam, then put the chopped strawberries on top of the cream.
13. Cover with the second sponge, and finally cover the whole cake with the remaining whipped cream icing.
14. Put in the fridge to set while you make the chocolate collar. If you are not making the collar, then the cake is ready to be served now. You can decorate the top with roasted dessicated coconut (which I colored pink for this occasion), and chopped strawberries. I made strawberry roses which you can learn how to do from any of the youtube videos, the way I did!

How to make the Chocolate Collar:

I followed few videos on youtube to learn how to make a chocolate collar. The ones I followed are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-RM7JyToew and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0F1bF0xJhY . However, there are so many videos on youtube to watch and learn, so go for it!

Basically, you need to take measurements of your iced cake’s height and circumference, then cut a baking paper strip of the same measurements. I had to embed hearts in the collar, and make a swirly design on top, so here is my template:

You need to melt the chocolate, put it in a piping bag with a very tiny hole and pipe the hearts. Make sure it is melted, and not tempered. This means you need to melt it all the way through without any chocolate bits remaining. Make sure you don’t burn it as chocolate is easy to burn. So, I made the hearts with white chocolate coloured pink, and put it in the fridge to harden completely. Then you need to melt (not temper) milk chocolate. Put it in a piping bag to pour over the collar. Use a spoon or spatula to spread it across the collar. First you need to make the swirly designs, as they need to be set before the collar can be prepared. The collar has to be only semi set otherwise it will break when you wrap it around the cake, but the swirly design needs to be set to hold its shape.

After preparing the collar, I wrapped it around the cake and put it in the fridge to set. It took exactly 2 seconds to set…like magic 🙂 . This is the outcome:

How to make the Chocolate Hearts:

These hearts can be pre made as they will take some time to set. Once set they will peel off easily off the baking paper.

You need to make heart templates on baking paper and fill them in using tempered chocolate. To temper chocolate, break some milk chocolate in equal sized pieces and put in a bowl. Put it in the microwave and run it for about 20 seconds at a time, till you reach a point when you have most of the chocolate melted with about 1-2 pieces remaining. Stir vigorously till all the chocolate is melted.

I made a template like this and made lots of hearts of different styles just in case they broke. They need to be handled carefully, and touched as little as possible. They are delicate, but not meltaway brittle. Just make sure if you are making designs inside the hearts, all the designs are linked and touch some other design, otherwise it will fall apart.

Finally, to arrange, I pushed a big heart on top of the iced cake.Then using a knife, I made a cut in the icing and cake perpendicular to the big heart, and pushed in a smaller heart in, creating an entwined hearts effect!

This was a super hit and super pretty cake, and I had so much fun trying these new techniques…a must try for sure!!

Coconut Pineapple Cake

I was talking to one of my colleagues at work, and she was telling me about the flavour of the cake on her wedding. She was the one who introduced me to Coconut Pineapple cake flavour, and then the research began…. For a perfect eggless coconut pineapple cake, with perfect fresh cream coconut icing. This recipe is the result of about 2 or 3 different experiments, which were done on my extremely eager and zealous guinea pigs :-p

This is a fabulous recipe, and I used it to make the base cake for the Pirate cake for my twins’ 4th birthday cake. I also used the same recipe to make cupcakes and they came out amazing as well. The only difference in the cupcakes was that I used cream cheese icing instead of fresh cream icing…still great!

In the picture of the Pirate cake below, the base cake, (where you can see the white sides) is the coconut pineapple cake. The boat is a chocolate cake covered in two types of ganache, which I will cover in my post about Chocolate Ganache frosting. There are lots of elements to this Pirate cake, which I have covered in another post about this cake.

Makes a 7 inch cake

For the cake:

Ingredients:

Plain Flour – 1 1/3 cups

Baking Soda- 3/4 teaspoon

Baking powder – 1 1/2 teaspoons

Condensed Milk – 1/2 tin (See notes)

Pineapple juice from pineapple tin – 200 – 250 gms (see notes)

Finely desiccated coconut – 3/4 cup

Pineapple pieces (round pieces) from tin – 5 (See notes)

Vanilla essence – 1 teaspoon

Butter, softened – 4 tablespoons

For the Fresh Cream Icing:

Double Cream – 170 ml

Icing sugar – 2 tablespoons

Mascarpone cheese – 3 heaped tablespoons

Finely dessicated coconut – 2 heaped tablespoons

Pineapple pieces (round pieces) from tin, chopped – 2

Vanilla essence – 1 teaspoon

Method:

For the cake:

Preheat oven at 180 degrees C.

Sift together the Plain flour, baking soda and baking powder. Add the dessicated coconut, and mix well.

At least 2-3 hours before starting to make the cake, open the pineapple tin and run the pineapple and juice through a sieve to drain the juice. Don’t throw away the pineapple juice, as you are going to use this in the cake. Let the pieces dry a little bit as 2 of these will be sandwiched between the layers of the cake, and will make the cake soggy if they are wet.

Make sure all liquid ingredients are at room temperature, and the butter is soft but not liquid. In a food processor or blender, blend together 3 pineapple pieces along with the pineapple juice, so that you get pineapple pulp.

In a separate bowl, mix together the condensed milk, vanilla essence and softened butter. Mix till well blended. Finally add the pineapple pulp and mix well again.

Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and pour in all the well blended wet ingredients. Mix well with hand, but don’t overbeat. Do not use a hand blender at all, since this will ruin the batter.

Once the batter is ready, put it in a well greased 7 inch pan and bake at 200 degrees C for 10 minutes, and at 150 degrees C for further 10 minutes. Alternatively, you can bake at 180 degrees C for about 18 minutes. Bake till a toothpick inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Take the cake out of the oven and let it stand for 10 minutes. Then invert it on a wire rack and leave to cool further.

For the Fresh Cream Icing:

Keep the whisk and bowl in the fridge at least an hour before beating the cream.

Whisk the double cream and icing sugar in a food processor/hand held whisk till stiff peaks form.

In a separate bowl, beat the mascarpone cheese till softened. We are using the icing sugar and mascarpone cheese to stabilise the cream so that it doesn’t melt at room temperature and it stays for longer.

Fold (don’t beat!!) in the beaten cream and dessicated coconut into the mascarpone cheese.

Once the cake is cooled down, cut it horizontally into 2 pieces. Spread the frosting on the top of the bottom piece. Spread the 2 dried, chopped pineapple pieces on top of the cream. Put the top layer of the cake on top of the bottom layer. Spread the remaining frosting on the top and sides of the cake and enjoy!!

Notes:

1. I have used a 397 gm tin condensed milk can. Even if you have slightly bigger or smaller, it won’t make a lot of difference.
2. The pineapple tin should have pineapple in own juice, not syrup. If you can’t find such a tin, then discard the syrup and only use the pineapples. For the pineapple juice, use good quality Pineapple juice from a bottle/carton.
3. The pineapple pieces should be dry as some of them will be used as a filling between cake layers and wet pineapple will make the cake soggy. Drain the juice in a bowl, and set the pieces aside to dry 2-3 hours before starting to bake.