Baking hack: Lime and coconut drizzle cake
Sometimes I really abuse recipes and push them to the limit. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case I had a whole bunch of limes, left over from a bachelorette party that involved a lot of freshly squeezed margaritas…and an itch to practice piping buttercream. So, where to begin? What goes with limes... uuuh coconut, yes. Begin google search for lime and coconut: find a backbone recipe. But there is only coconut in the frosting: Boring! Begin substituting: Butter becomes coconut oil, Sub flour for desiccated coconut. Lime zest in the cake. Still have a whole lot of limes: Make a drizzle. Make a curd (Got to use the yolks - whites went into the buttercream). No coconut in frosting: boring. Colour coconut green and paste on outside. Will it work? Bite nails, wait and see. And so you see the logic of my brain that makes a cooking frenzy. The result.. it worked! and it was as limey and coco-nutty as I hoped, although a little more lurid and green than I imagined. And Dylan ends up getting force-fed cake the entire break - Poor guy!
Ingredients
For the cake
2 1/4 cups cake flour
1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1 Tbs. baking powder
3/4 tsp. salt
1 3/4 cups coconut milk
1 Tbs. vanilla extract
16 oz Coconut oil
1 cup sugar
1 Tbs. finely chopped lime zest
4 eggs
For the drizzle
1 cup lime juice
1 cup sugar
For the lime curd
1 stick butter
4 egg yolks
3/4 cup lime juice
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 cup sugar
Buttercream and decorations
Desiccated shredded coconut (unsweetened)
Green food coloring
Directions
Have all the ingredients at room temperature.
Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease and flour three 6-inch round cake pans; tap out excess flour. I also cut out parchment in a circle to line the bottom of the tins, makes the final shape neater and and makes extra-sure your cakes are going to come out in one piece…
In the bowl of your mixer, beat the butter on medium speed until creamy and smooth, 1 to 2 minutes, using the flat paddle.
Add the sugar and lime zest and continue beating until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes, stopping the mixer occasionally to scrape down the sides of the bowl. This is called the “creaming method” of making cakes and gives a denser, more tender crumb.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Then reduce the speed to low.
Sift the flour, baking powder and salt together into a clean bowl, and in a separate bowl, mix the milk and vanilla.
Alternate adding the flour and milk mixtures to the bowl, in about three additions, and end with the flour, stopping occasionally to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Only mix until just combined - over-beating it will cause gluten to develop and then your cake will be tough.
Divide the batter between your cake tins and put in the preheated oven. They will seem quite full but the cake doesn’t rise that much. Don’t open your oven to check within the first 20 mins as the cake will sink due to the change in air pressure.
Bake for 30 - 45 mins (begin checking at 30 mins as some ovens take longer than others) the cake is ready when a wooden toothpick comes out clean, with no goo attached to it (crumbs are fine). Then remove and leave to cool on a wire rack.
While the cake is baking, make the curd:
Whisk together the eggs, sugar, lemon and lime juice and place on a double boiler on the stove. You can use a small pot with about 3 inches of water in it, with a metal or glass bowl resting over it.
Unwrap the butter and cut into 4-5 pieces ready to add to the mix.
Bring the water up to a gentle bubble, whisking the egg mixture non-stop.
Whisk, without stopping until the mixture thickens up. Then add the pieces of butter and continue whisking. Don’t stop! or you get scrambled eggs!
When the mix has thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon quite thickly, transfer the bowl to the fridge to cool down.
This is actually PAssion fruit curd
But you can see how thick it should be
Make the drizzle
Melt together the sugar and lime juice in a pot.
When the cakes are cool, remove from the tins and peel away the parchment. Use a skewer to poke holes over the tops of the cakes and drizzle the drizzle over all three cakes.
Make the Swiss buttercream. This is the only buttercream I make now, it is so worth the trouble! you can make this in advance and refrigerate for up to a week or even freeze if you want. When you want to use it just bring it to a cool room temperature naturally.
Take out about 1/2 of the white buttercream and put it in a piping bag, you don’t need a nozzle. It is so worth buying the disposable ones if you are going to be doing a lot of baking. Life is just too short to wash out those damn things, get sticky up to your elbows and then drape them around your kitchen to dry, ugh.
If you want a different colored icing for the top, you can slowly mix in a few drops of food coloring now, and put it in another piping bag, with a piping tip. I used the large star tip from this set for the piping in the final picture.
Build the cake
When the cakes and curd are cool, you can build the cake.
Pipe a ring of buttercream on top of two of the cakes, just 1/8th of an inch from the edge.
Fill the inside of the two rings with lime curd.
Place one of the two curd-topped cakes on a 6-inch cardboard disk . Place the other cake on top, curd facing up, then place the final cake with no topping, upside down on top. This will give you a nice sharp shape to ice.
Place the cake carefully in the fridge, it has to be very cold to ice nicely. If you have one, place it on your cake turntable already, this little gadget makes it so so so much easier to ice!
When the cake is cold cold cold, it is ready to ice. If it is warm, it is very soft and the delicate cake can get pulled away as you ice.
Snip about a 1/4 of an inch off the tip of your white icing bag and pipe a snake around your cake from bottom to top. It doesn’t matter if there are gaps in between. Swirl icing around the top of the cake too.
Use a scraper to smooth the icing down, keeping the hand holding the scraper still and using the other hand to turn your cake stand. Use the scraper to smooth the top of the cake so you get sharp edges.
This takes a bit of practice. At some stage I’m going to make this buttercream recipe into a blog post and put some photos and videos in too. You can eat as is or decorate further as below. It really is a delicious cake and once you have mad the buttercream and iced a few cakes, the whole process only have about 1.5 hours active time. Its all about multitasking while the cake is cooking and cooling!
To finish: Mix a few drops of green food coloring into about a cup of coconut and press gently to the sides of the cake.
Paint color up the sides of a piping bag and swirl some lightly tinted butter cream on the top using a star nozzle.
Voila! A damn good cake, think, after my sister’s wedding cake, my best!
