Heaven On Seven Coconut Cake

To kick off my summer reminiscing, I am going to tell you about my experience baking Heaven On Seven's famous coconut cake! It all started when Father's day rolled around. My dad is a huge cajun food fan (my mom makes him homemade crawfish étouffée about once a week) so I decided that I would make him this very intricate cake. Once I got copious amounts of coconut products including shredded coconut and coconut milk, I began this labor of love. My first step was to roast the shredded coconut, and once this was done I began working on the custard filling. The custard was one of the most challenging parts for me because I had to make sure the coconut milk didn't curdle but still thickened. I then proceeded to make the cake batter itself. This was also quite time consuming mainly because of the copious amounts of eggs, sugar and butter I needed to make the three tiered cake. To my dismay, I still needed even more eggs to make a meringue to fold into the batter. A dozen and a half eggs later, the batter was ready to bake off in three buttered cake pans. Slightly deviating from the original recipe, I made a coconut buttercream frosting instead of a cream cheese based frosting because my dad doesn't like too heavy a frosting. Once the custard filling was fully set and the cakes were done, it was time to assemble the elaborate cake. I started by getting a cake platter and laying down the first layer of cake. After covering it with the coconut custard filling, I sprinkled it with some extra roasted coconut. After repeating this for the two other layers, it was time to frost! After the process of frosting and sprinkling coconut on the top and sides of the cake, my labor of love was finally done! The result was an amazingly moist cake that had the perfect amount of texture from the roasted coconut throughout the cake. Although I may not be making the cake again soon, I can't wait to attempt this splendid cake again soon!