Delicious Coconut Cake: Searching for the finest recipe for coconut cake? We tried a ton of different ingredients to find the greatest coconut flavor, including toasted coconut, coconut extract, cream of coconut, coconut cream, and more!
Imperial Sugar is the sponsor of this post! I’ve been a longtime customer of Imperial Sugar, so I’m excited to be working with them. We appreciate your support of the partners who enable the ongoing bake-offs!
Delicious Coconut Cake
METHODOLOGY
- 32 total tasters
- All 9 cakes were baked fresh the day of tasting
- All tasters ranked each cake on a scale from 0-10 for flavor, texture, frosting and overall as a whole
- All cakes were baked in a parchment-lined 8 or 9″ cake pan
INGREDIENTS
- Gold Medal bleached all-purpose flour
- Bob’s Red Mill coconut flour
- King Arthur cake flour
- Trader Joe’s butter
- Trader Joe’s coconut milk
- Spectrum virgin coconut oil
- Baker’s sweetened shredded coconut
- Bob’s Red Mill baking powder and soda
- Daisy sour cream
- Kate’s buttermilk
- Philadelphia cream cheese
- Hellmann’s mayo
- McCormick coconut extract
- Heilala vanilla extract
- Diamond kosher salt
- Imperial granulated and powdered sugar
FAT TYPE
- Oil and butter: This combination of fat has always done well in the bake-offs. But the three butter and oil-based recipes (from Cooking Classy, Bravetart, and Sugar Geek Show) caused a lot of disagreement among the tasters. I believe that Cooking Classy’s artificial coconut flavor received a worse rating than the cake texture on Sugar Geek Show.
- Butter: It shocked me to learn that cakes with butter tend to win this bake-off more often than cakes with oil and butter. But I believe the extra richness from the coconut milk made the cake feel moister than it would have on its own. Additionally,
- I believe that in certain butter-based cakes, the shredded coconut overshadowed the texture of the clean crumb. In general, I believe that a butter cake will work really well in a coconut cake bake-off—especially if coconut milk or another type of fat is involved!
- Mayo: In essence, mayonnaise is an emulsion of vinegar, egg whites, and oil. Therefore, using it in cake isn’t all that strange! The precise impact of mayo on Thomas Keller’s mayo-based cake is difficult to determine because of the several other confounding variables.
- However, oil-based cakes will always be more moist than butter-based cakes, therefore I believe it played a part in the texture’s increased moisture.
COCONUT FLAVOR
- Coconut extract: While popular among the recipes, coconut extract was generally condemned by tasters for having an artificial flavor. I do agree that you can easily end up with a sunscreen-esque flavored cake. I’d generally prefer getting coconut flavor elsewhere.
- Coconut flour: Bravetart’s recipe was the only one to use coconut flour. I think it worked in tandem with the unrefined coconut oil to provide a floral but not over-the-top coconut flavor. However, coconut flour works very differently than AP flour, so I’d be wary of swapping it into recipes casually.
- Unrefined coconut oil: See above. I think swapping out half butter for coconut oil in your favorite recipe could be a great way to maintain the texture while adding more coconut flavor.
- Shredded coconut: Adding shredded coconut to the cake batter is a great way to get a subtle kick of coconut flavor (it’s really not that strong!). However, I don’t enjoy the bumpy texture that coconut adds to cake, so it’s a trade off if you feel similarly. Some people do enjoy the heartier texture though!
ALSO SEE
DAIRY TYPE
- Sour cream: Over the course of conducting more than 40 bake offs, sour cream has become one of my favorite dairy types to use in cakes because of the moisture it brings. Sally’s (the top-rated) was the only one to use sour cream in this batch of cakes. Coincidence? Could be, but I think sour cream truly does contribute to a delightfully moist crumb.
- Heavy cream: I was hopeful that the heavy cream in Peninsula Grill’s recipe would turn out a dreamily rich crumb, but unfortunately there were too many other factors to really taste the difference. And using the heavy cream in conjunction with all-purpose flour didn’t lead to the fine crumb I’d hoped for.
- Buttermilk: Both Sugar Geek Show and Thomas Keller used buttermilk, which I think serves as a paler imitation of sour cream in cakes. Still good, but won’t lead to as moist a crumb.
- Coconut milk: Most recipes use coconut milk as a moistener, which is an excellent way to both moisten a cake and provide more fat.
- (Sally’s uses coconut milk + sour cream, a great combination.). Note that the flavor of the coconut milk is so subtle that most people couldn’t detect it when it was the only coconut product used in a cake.
RESULTS
- This is the second bake-off in which the tasters as a whole ranked my personal favorite in the lower half. As usual, I believe it’s better to read the blog post as a whole to learn about each cake recipe’s characteristics rather than assume the one at the top will be the greatest.
- And because I’m just a passionate home baker, please always take the outcomes with a grain of salt! If the outcomes are less than satisfactory, it might be the consequence of a baker’s error rather than a recipe problem (I always strive to reveal when I think an error happened).
- You should definitely go through the explanations of each recipe since I genuinely believe that most of them are great and worthwhile to attempt!