 Hi, I'm Stephanie Jaworski at Joybaking.com. Today we're going to make a coconut cake. And this is made with a white butter cake. It's going to be filled with a tangy lemon curd and then we're going to cover the whole cake with lots of white fluffy seven minute frosting and then garnish it with dried coconut. So the first thing we're going to do is our white butter cake. So preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 180 degrees Celsius. And you will need two nine inch, that's 23 centimeter, round cake pans. And this one I'm using has sides of about just a little shy of two inches, which is five centimeters. And then what we're going to do is butter and flour our pans. So I like to use melted butter. So just melt a little bit of butter in a saucepan. And then I use a pastry brush, makes it nice and easy. And just do bottom and the sides. So and then we want to flour this. So I just have a little bit of flour and just put it in there. And then just kind of see what I'm doing. Just kind of coat the whole pan with the flour. And that will prevent our cake from sticking. And then normally I do this over the sink. It's going to get a little noisy. You want to tap the flour out like so. And then just to make doubly sure that our cake doesn't stick, I'm going to use a round of parchment on the bottom. You don't have to do that. But absolutely necessary. So now if you have a stand mixer like I have here, use your paddle attachment or you could just use a hand mixer for this as well. And you need to start with one cup, 225 grams of butter. Have that at room temperature. As you know, I like unsalted butter. I prefer the flavor. But you can use salted whichever one you personally like. And then I'm just going to beat this just for like a minute, just until it gets nice and creamy and smooth. Okay, just takes a minute. Your butter was a little cold. You might have to beat it a little more. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to have my mixer on low to medium low speed. And I'm going to gradually add one and three quarter cups, which is 350 grams of granulated white sugar. So I'll just add a little to start here. Okay, I do it that way because it's a large amount of sugar. And then it beats in faster if I do it gradually. So now what I'm going to do, I'm going to continue to beat this on medium high speed, probably both three minutes, until it gets nice and light and fluffy. But what I'm going to do now is I'm going to add my one teaspoon of pure vanilla extract because then the vanilla will just flavor that butter sugar mixture. Okay. Okay, we're done. As you can see, this is what it should look like. It's lightened in colors, you can see, and there's lots of air. Really nice and light and fluffy. When you're making cakes, you want quite a bit of air beaten in with a butter cake. That gives you a really nice light texture, which we want. So now what we're going to do is add four large eggs and have your eggs at room temperature because room temperature eggs will mix into your batter a lot easier than if they were cold. So we're just going to do it one at a time. Add one, between 20, 30 seconds, and then keep adding the rest. And scrape down the bottom and sides of your bowl as much as you need to. That quick stir. Next egg. Okay, now let's give it a quick stir. just give it a quick stir. If you do find that your batter has curdled a little, sometimes if your eggs are a little cold that will happen. But don't worry, once we add our dry ingredients it will smooth right out. Or you could try beating it just a little more and that sometimes helps as well. So now for our dry ingredients, in a separate bowl I have 2 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 cups, 325 grams of all-purpose flour, you may know that is plain flour. And to that I'm going to add 2 teaspoons egg grams of baking powder and a half a teaspoon, 2 grams of baking soda and a half a teaspoon of salt. I like to use kosher salt. It has a milder flavor which I like. Now if you use salted butter, I would probably just leave out the salt. Now you could sift your flour mixture or just really give it a good whisk which I'm doing here. Because you want to, one, it aerates the flour and two, you're mixing it making sure that that baking powder and baking soda is mixed in because otherwise you can get little sometimes clumps which will be bitter tasting which we don't want in our cake. And the other thing where you will need is 1 cup, 240 ml of buttermilk. Look again, have that at room temperature. Now I know some people can't find buttermilk so you can make a really great substitute. Just take 1 cup, 240 ml of just regular milk, have it at room temperature, stir in 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or even a vinegar and just let it sit at room temperature about 10 minutes and you have your own buttermilk. And I like to use buttermilk here because it gives a really nice moist and tender crumb to our cake. And it's something a little different than just regular milk. So now what we're going to do is add the flour in three additions and alternate that in two additions with the buttermilk. So just add, I ball it here, about a third and gradually beat this in because we don't want that flour up in our face. So just low speed. Okay, and then I'm going to add about half of the buttermilk. I'll add a bit more flour. Add the rest of our buttermilk and finally stir for a hour. You may wonder why we do it all in stages but if you added all that flour at once and then all that buttermilk, you'd be mixing and mixing and mixing. And the more you mix, the more gluten you get and then a tougher cake. So if you do it in stages like this, it keeps our cake nice and moist and tender. Which is what we want. So now we're going to divide our batter. So you can see I still have a little flour on the side so I'm just going to give that quick stir and make sure we got it all mixed. Okay, so now we're going to divide. Now if you can just eyeball the amount or if you have a scale, it's really great. But of course your pans need to weigh the same amount. Otherwise it gets a little complicated. So make sure you weigh your pans before you put the batter into make sure that they both weigh about the same. Go with that. But I am going to weigh just to make doubly sure. Because you want your cakes to have about the same amount of batter so they bake in the same amount of time. So a little off. So about 10. Okay, just a little. It wouldn't make that much difference but since I'm using the scale might as well be really accurate. So now you can just use the back of a spoon or I'm using one of these little offset spatulas. Just spread your batter out. Now when we bake our cakes, keep in mind everyone's oven is a little different, bake in a little different time. Some are running hot, some are running a little cool. So I would say always check. Whatever the baking time is, check your cakes even a few minutes before that because you don't want to over bake them and then they tend to be a little dry which we don't want. So we're going to bake these. I find in my oven about 28 to 30 minutes. They'll get a really nice golden brown crust and of course when your toothpick goes in the center it should just come out clean. Okay, that looks pretty good. Try to space your pans a little bit apart so the air can circulate around both of the pans. Okay, our cakes are done. Don't they look gorgeous? So just place your pans on a wire rack like this and what we're going to do is let them cool in the pan for about 10 minutes and when we come back I'll show you how to remove them. Okay, now to take our cakes out of the pan. The first thing I do is I'm just going to lightly butter the rack that I'm going to put the cake on because we don't want it as it cools, we don't want it to stick. So let's do that and then take rack, oh first sorry, just take a knife for an offset spatula and just run it around the inside there just to make sure that our cake isn't sticking. You don't want to leave half the cake in the pan and then flip like so. Hopefully it should come right off and then if you use parchment just peel that off gently so then we're going to flip it onto that buttered rack and we do this, this helps to prevent the cakes from cracking as they cool and then we butter it so that it won't stick to the rack. So what I'm going to do is let these cool completely and then when we come back we'll start our seven minute frosting. So now we'll start our seven minute frosting. Now this is considered like an old-fashioned frosting and it's meringue. Really, that's what it is. It's egg white and sugar and sugar. Now it doesn't tend to store very well, it tends to get a little granular so it's best to make and then frost your cake and serve it on the same day. Although we are going to add a little corn syrup which helps to prevent the sugar crystallization plus it kind of gives it the frosting like a marshmallow flavor. Very good. You'll need a saucepan of simmering water and stainless steel bowl and you will need three large egg whites, that's 90 grams and half your egg whites at room temperature and one and a half cups, 300 grams of granulated water sugar and like I said we're going to add just one tablespoon of light corn syrup to prevent that sugar crystallization. You could use a golden syrup and then a quarter of a teaspoon of cream of tartar because that will help stabilize the whites. Cream of tartar is usually found on the spice section of your grocery store. Now if you can't find it then you can just add a little bit of salt and then I'm adding just to thin the whites out, the egg whites out, I'm adding a quarter of a cup 60 milliliters of cold water. Now you will need a hand mixer because like I said it's going to be at least seven minutes, sometimes longer if it's a humid day it can take even longer. I mean you could use a wire whisk but you'd have to have a really strong arm. So I'm just going to beat this on low speed just to mix everything together. Okay well that's, but we just want to get it all mixed now. Let's get that water simmer. You might want to check your water periodically when you're beating this just to make sure it's at a simmer. So now I'm going to beat for about three minutes on medium low speed. Okay that's been about three minutes. This is what you're looking for. It's got like whipped cream, a little thicker. Make sure you just as you're doing it scrape the sides to make sure there's no sugar crystals forming there. So now what I'm going to do is turn it on my mixer on high speed and beat for about another three minutes until it's really thick and form soft peaks. Okay so take that off of the heat and that's, that was about six minutes or this is what you're looking for. You can see nice soft peaks to really thick. Now depending too on how hot your water was you may need to do it a little longer. Now I'm going to add some vanilla extract, one teaspoon of pure vanilla extract. Now if you wanted to add like maybe a little lemon flavor you could add instead some pure lemon extract or even because it's coconut cake you could add some pure coconut extract. But I'm going to use vanilla here. So what I'm going to do is continue to beat this for about a minute or so. So I have it total about seven minutes and until it's really nice and thick and of spreading consistency. Okay looks about right. My arm tells me it's been a while. I'm going to get a nice extra science. Now so this, now we can very nicely spread this on our cake. So when I feel this it's still quite warm because we did do it over simmering water. So I'm going to put this aside and let it cool down just a bit and then it also will thicken up and when we come back we will assemble our cake. So now we're ready to assemble our cake. So we have our two cooled cakes and our frosting is nice and cool and thick as you can see. It does look like marshmallow and you will need three cups. It's 150 grams of dried coconut. Now you can use sweetened or unsweetened dried coconut either one and shredded, flaked which you know whatever your preference. I'm actually using unsweetened because I kind of think we got a lot of sweetness in everything else. And then you will need one cup 240 milliliters of lemon curd. Now you can buy your lemon curd or I like to make it and there is a recipe along with the video on the site for that and what's great is you can make your lemon curd up to a week in advance and actually and put it in the fridge and actually I find it better if you make it a few days in advance. So that way we don't have too much to do. So now what we're going to do is assemble. Now we have to cut our cake layers in half. Now what I like to do is you don't have to but these cake circles or cardboard cake circles you can get them at cake decorating stores or like Michaels, Joanne's and I just like to put that under the cake and that way if you want to lift it up I mean you got something that you can use and so what I'm going to do is just so it sticks a little here. Move round and then. Now if you don't have this you can just kind of move the cake as you're cutting it. You will need a large like a serrated knife or a nice straight edge and I like to use a long one that's you know that way you can get all the way through the cake and then just use your knife and do about half way just kind of eyeball and what I do is I cut in you know a few inches and then I keep turning and cutting you can see this. So if you didn't have a turntable just keep you know doing turning your cake and just work it all the way around and hopefully you'll meet up and then just kind of work your knife right through the whole cake and hopefully we'll have a nice even divide it in half. Yeah see as you can see that way if you do it that way you get more of an even so now you could decorate your cake rate on there I'm going to do it on here just to show you take your cake pedestal and then what I like to do is just put some either you can use wax paper parchment like that so that way if we slop which I tend to do you can you can just you'll slop on the paper and you just take that out after so what we're going to do I'm going to do this so I'll take one layer just like so and then now if you wanted a little more coconut flavor you could sprinkle a little coconut milk on there but I find this is more enough so I'm going to take and maybe like about a third of a cup and I'm just going to eyeball I mean you could use and then because what we want is a thin layer of lemon curd on here and then spread it out. I find the lemon curd at adds a lot of flavor and it kind of cuts the sweetness of the frosting and the cake so there we have that and then I'm just going to sprinkle with a you know couple tablespoons just a little thin layer of coconut like so I mean you can use as much as or as little as you want and then I'm just going to continue do the same thing for the next layer and they're tough layer so I just kind of want to make sure that that's even and now for our frosting. So doesn't that look gorgeous? So we're just going to just going to work this around and down the sides and then we can put again as much or as little coconut as you want. Isn't that look gorgeous? Nice party cake and you can just kind of put it on. It's why it's good to have that parchment paper because if you're like me you can make a little bit of a mess so I'm just going to you get the idea. So once you're done that then what you can do is simply pull out your parchment and you know fix up the sides if you may be and you're ready to go. Now you could this will hold in the fridge for you know a few hours and I mean you can store the leftovers overnight. Like I said you may find a little bit of your frosting may harden a little on the outside crout you might got a bit of a crust and it may get a little granular but it's still great. So now excuse my mess there. So now I usually like to sit a little bit before I cut it but we will cut it now and give it a try. So it's a big cake. Okay, there we go. Oh, doesn't that look gorgeous? That fluffy white frosting, that's seven minutes, is really a nice, a really great frosting. The looks and the taste. So I got to get some of that. I really like that. Get the really fluffy marshmallow-y frosting, the dried coconut, the lemon curd, the buttermilk, I mean, what's not to like? So try it and enjoy. And until next time, I'm Stephanie Javorski, enjoybaking.com.