For Mike's birthday this year he asked for a Coconut Cake. This very special cake recipe has been handed down through generations in his family. It is his very, very favorite cake. I realized that I hadn't made it for him in a long, long time.
I bought the fresh coconuts and all the other good ingredients. I poked holes in the end and showed the kids what coconut milk looks and tastes like. Then I left them following the recipe to mix up the cake batter, while I took the coconut outdoors. I beat it with a hammer on the sidewalk, but it just bounced around. I got the baby sledge from the garage and managed to finally crack it. With every smack of the sledge shards of coconut flew. No matter what technique I used, pieces went every direction. I finished the massacre, took off my safety goggles, and gathered up the bits. Then I rinsed them in the sink to get the grass off.
The kids finished the batter and I poured it into the round pans and put it in to bake. Then I started trying to pry the coconut meat from the hull so I could grate it. Hello? Is there a special tool for that? The people who first discovered that coconuts are edible must have been starving to death. I broke off all my nails and the points of a couple of knives. The cakes baked and the timer went off, and I was still trying to get the coconut off the shell so I could grate it.
They smelled great. I opened the oven. Instead of two nice round layer cakes we'd made two nice round pancakes. The kids looked at them and then remembered that they forgot to add the baking powder. Yep, that would do it. I started mixing up more cake batter.
When that was finally in the oven, I tackled the coconut again. I scraped, peeled and tore off enough of the white stuff, grated it, and gave up on the rest. I justified the waste by telling myself the chickens deserve a treat, too. And they have beaks.
The cakes came out and looked great. While they cooled I started to get everything ready for the white icing. I got a perfectly clean bowl and beater, then started whipping up the mounds of egg whites. They had to be fluffy and stiff ~ but not too stiff and dry. Hmmm. It was all starting to come back to me now. I think I remembered why I hadn't made this cake for my sweetie in over a decade.
The next step for the icing involved heating sugar syrup until it "makes a string that floats up." Now, my mother-in-law can do this beautifully. I've seen her do it, and she even tried to teach me how early in my marriage. The Rhodes women who went before me made this lovely cake without the benefit of modern conveniences. But for some reason, I am completely incapable of making a simple sugar syrup.
I mixed up a batch, tested constantly, and watch breathlessly for that elusive floaty thread of sugar syrup. As I stirred, I remembered that the last time I made this icing all those years ago, I left it on the heat one millisecond too long and the whole thing instantly turned into a granulated blob right before my eyes. I panicked. I didn't want another granulated blob, so I yanked the pan off off the heat and drizzled it carefully into the whipped whites. Unfortunately this time I removed the pan from the heat one millisecond too soon, and the whole thing turned into a runny mess right before my eyes.
I started again. Whip more whites. Boil more sugar syrup. Watch and wait, then hurry and pray. Viola! Finally, it came out right. And it's a good thing. Because no matter what that icing looked like, it was going on that cake and we were eating it. And everyone, including the birthday boy, was going to say it was delicious.
