Coconut Cake, Top of the List, Almost

 

No, we haven't had snow yet. I made this coconut cake when we had a beautiful snowfall on January 3, 2022 because it just didn't get made before Christmas of 2021.

But I'm thinking back to November of 2020--you remember that year, don't you? The year the world shut down and many of us had Thanksgiving in our house, alone?

That November I started watching every new Hallmark Christmas movie premier. Religiously. It had been that kind of a year.

 

I even kept a pen and notebook nearby and titled a list--"What Hallmark Movies Taught Me About Christmas."

Top of the list was...Baking is good!

Fruitcake is top of my baking list (my White Fruitcake with no citron posted here "Stir Up Sunday") 

Coconut Cake is not far behind. 

 One of my favorite childhood Christmas memories is of Mama making her Coconut Cake with lemon filling on Christmas Eve and it being refrigerated overnight and eaten cold on Christmas Day.

It was a serious project requiring Daddy's help in poking an ice pick into the eyes of the fresh coconut to save the coconut water to pour over the warm cake layers, tediously removing the shell from the meat, and finally grating the coconut meat, sometimes resulting in scraped knuckles. 

 

It was a cake straight from heaven!

Foolishly neglecting to secure Mama's recipe before she left us for her heavenly home, I've tried several recipes. One was very good and also very time consuming:

See my post Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal here!

I finally found a recipe that was very close to Mama's in Eugene Walters, American Cooking: Southern Style, a Time Life book and a fascinating history of Southern cooking.

I have four cookbooks from the Alabama author, who I "met" through Pat Conroy's cookbook. He taught me never to use the black dust that you put in salt and pepper shakers, that the essential oils in peppercorns help with digestion when freshly ground. Although RH still demands his black dust.

I wish I could link to Mr. Walter's recipe for Coconut Cake with Lemon Filling but it's not online. I will link to a recipe I substituted for his frosting recipe that required me to boil to 239 degrees. I found one at addapinch.com. It was delicious even though not like Mama's. Maybe hers was whipped cream based?  But I did make Eugene's recipe for cake instead of the one at add a pinch--those 8 eggs separated won me over--and I am going to put his recipe for lemon filling at the bottom of the post because it's become my foolproof go-to recipe for that. 

 

Full Disclaimer: I did not buy a fresh coconut and poke out his eyes! Despite using Baker's coconut flakes the frosting was excellent. It was one of those times when we didn't see any family to share my baking with so eventually the remains went to the birds. 

 

Take my word for it, RH had hardly turned around and all our resident crows and bluejays were fighting over their dessert of the day. 

Eugene Walters Lemon Filling:

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/4 cup cornstarch

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 eggs, lightly beaten

2 tablespoons butter, cut into 1/4 inch bits

2 tablespoons finely grated fresh lemon peel

2/3 cup strained fresh lemon juice [I did not strain it]

1 cup water

Combine the sugar, cornstarch, salt and 2 beaten eggs in a heavy 2 quart saucepan and mix well with a wire whisk or wooden spoon. Stir in the butter bits, lemon peel, lemon juice, and water. When all ingredients are well blended, set pan over high heat.

Stirring the filling mixture constantly, bring to a boil over high heat. Immediately reduce heat to low and continue to stir until the filling is smooth and thick enough to coat the spoon heavily. Scrape the filling into a bowl with a spatula, and let it cool to room temperature.

What's top of your baking list for Christmas?

 

 

 

 

 

Blues In My Kitchen

When I first saw the real estate picture of the kitchen in this 1935 cottage, something about it whispered,

"You could be so content here."

It was narrow but I've always loved galley kitchens. 

Here is the listing photo:

My heart did sink at the black appliances, but they could be replaced with white ones eventually. 

I knew the first thing I would do would be to take down the curtains.

That done, the windows let in the morning sunshine, especially after RH and our son discovered hinges at the top of the big one outside that let them open it up to clean the inside section too.

Plants flourish in this window. Small pots of herbs can go there next winter.

We won't be doing any kitchen renovation here, had enough of that during the five month kitchen build at our old house.

But the cabinets in this small kitchen soon filled up, even with us bringing in two cabinets of our own.

I kept looking at that blank wall in the kitchen and turned to Pinterest for inspiration.

RH and his brother took it from there and built beautiful open shelves with plate grooves and a stainless steel rod to hold my pots and pans.

I don't mean they went out and bought shelving and corbels at Home Depot, not at those prices. They made every shelf and corbel themselves.

Instant space in my cupboards!

And a place to display the old pieces of Blue Willow my parents found for me in a church thrift store many decades ago.

Odds and ends of Blue Willow that I've ignored in recent years because blues were no longer in my kitchen or dining room color scheme. All brought out when unpacking and now I'm in love with Blue Willow again.

How does that happen? It's not as if Blue Willow is taking the blogging world by storm. Have you ever gone back to a first love?

We hung the heavy 1800s Staffordshire Blue Willow platter, our first good antique purchased as newlyweds, over the microwave.

Under it are treasured photos of my maternal grandfather in his butcher shop and my father, an excellent cook.

There already were two old blue and white flower pots at the sink.

A little blue near the coffee pot.

And blues in my wedding china, Copeland-Spode Blue Bird.

Now blues reign in my kitchen!

But kitchens are for cooking and what I like best to cook are the old Southern recipes.

I confess that I love fried chicken, potato salad, chicken salad, tomato aspic, poundcake, caramel cake, the food my mother and aunts used to make, the kind of food I saw women bring to countless Dinners on the Ground at church in my youth.

Even though I have French cookbooks, Italian cookbooks, etc., it is the old ones from the USA that I turn to over and over again. Like Eugene Walter's American Cooking: Southern Style above and James Beard: Delights and Prejudices, below.

All of James Beard's cookbooks are favorites of mine. I believe he was one of the best cooking teachers there ever was. He had the heart of a teacher.

And like me, he preferred electric stoves to gas ranges, unusual for a chef.

Someday I hope to replace this black stove with a white one.

Our son installed a pretty white Bosc dishwasher before we moved in and this last week RH bought me a white fridge! Not an impulse buy, the old fridge had issues--for one thing, no water in the door and too small for a Britt pitcher inside so we were buying three or four cases of water bottles a week.

Two down, one to go!

That's my kitchen, folks. I love it so much! It is a cheerful place to cook.

Thank you so very much for visiting me!

Want to know what I think about you all? Just read the message on this sweet new tea towel my future daughter-in-law gave me...

That's you, and you, and you!

P.S. Now I can bring back in the ugly black electric can opener, the dish drainers, the Kleenex box, the calendar--those things that would never be caught dead in a blogger's camera lens.

I'm giving you fair warning as of now though, my friends, they'll probably show up in my kitchen posts from now on. You bloggers work way too hard!