Coconut Cake Success

Doodle’s first birthday was a great success, as far as first birthdays in our family goes, anyways.  We like to keep it small, family only.  Honeybun’s first birthday was with my parents; Sugarplum’s was only hubby, Honeybun and me; and Doodle was fortunate to have my cousin and her boyfriend with us.

 Hubby came home from work a few hours early and Doodle opened his presents.  Then the girls went swimming while hubby and I made dinner.  And then the most important part of any first birthday: the cake!  We let Doodle have at his cake while we ate dinner (yes, my kid had cake for dinner and I really don’t feel one bit guilty about it!)

 The hardest part of the entire celebration was definitely making his cake.  He hasn’t had any wheat so a traditional cake was out.  He also hasn’t had any dairy so pretty much every other cake was out too!  He has had eggs, soy and coconut so I went from there and ended up doing a gluten free coconut cake with coconut frosting.

I used this recipe for the cake, though I made the following changes:

• I used coconut butter for the margarine/shortening
• I omitted the coconut extract and added a bit of extra coconut milk instead
• I used Guar Gum instead of the Xanthan Gum

The cake came out moist and delicious and didn’t have nearly the same nasty, grainy texture that Honeybun’s rice flour cake had.

The frosting proved a little trickier.  Because I wanted to be able to properly ice the cake, not glaze or pipe it, I had to look through a ton of recipes to find one that would be easily spreadable.  I finally came across this one and it worked perfectly!  I didn’t have the full 16 oz of powdered sugar (oops!) so I had to do a little at a time then thicken/thin until it was spreadable. I was very careful to not add too much milk without having more sugar to add!  I ended up not having quite enough to frost the whole cake (plus the cupcakes I made for everyone else) and decorate the cake, so I kept the icing on the back side thin since you wouldn’t see it in the pictures anyway!

The final cake was so cute and Doodle ate it right up! And so did hubby.  After two horrible failures at wheat free birthday cakes, I think I finally got it right!