Barefoot Contessa’s Coconut Cake Recipe Review
Sunday was Mark’s 30th birthday and we decided to host our family for dinner and drinks.
We’ve never had a dinner party before because we’ve never had the space, so this was a milestone event.
We even got to open a tiny bottle of champagne that Mark’s aunt gave us. She gave us a whole set with instructions to open each one at different milestone events. This was the “first dinner party” bottle.
I was pumped to do a dinner party because I’ve been itching to try out the new bakeware that we got for our wedding.
It’s Williams-Sonoma’s gold touch bakeware, and I am here to tell you that it is worth the price because it is magical. I’ve never seen cookies slide right off a pan. And I’ve never in my life gotten a cake out of a pan in one piece. Until last weekend.
I asked Mark what kind of cake he wanted and he said a coconut cake.
I used a Barefoot Contessa (Ina Gartner) recipe that I’d found on the Food Network. It involves five (count them … 5) sticks of butter and a hell of a lot of sugar. This cake turned out amazing. I gotta hand it to the bakeware … that or the patience I’ve aquired with age. I’ve never made a cake that turned out — either the damn thing sticks in the pan or I get crumbs in the frosting. But feast your eyes on this beauty!
Not a crumb in sight! I will say that sprinkling coconut on top of the cake hid the couple of unavoidable crumbs. But I’ve seen enough cake shows in recent years to know to crumb coat my cakes now. #protip
I was also extra excited to finally get to use the gorgeous platter that Steph got us for our wedding.
This platter comes from my favorite ceramics artist, Justin Rothshank. If you follow me on Instagram you’ve seen my dorky mugs with Buffy and MJ. He makes those too.
We decided to freeze half of the cake for my mom’s birthday in September since she’ll be coming to visit. Trust me, this was a hard decision. I could bake another cake, but we really didn’t need to eat a whole cake to ourselves. 🙂
I didn’t take pictures of all the other delicious stuff that we made for this dinner party, but I’ve started collecting recipes I’ve been making on Pinterest on a board called Pinterest Wins. The biggest win was a tossup between this crock pot pulled pork recipe and this spicy gin cooler recipe. And although I made a pretty mean batch of lemon ice cream (recipe coming soon!), the cake stole the show for sure.
Have you hosted a dinner party? What are your favorite crowd-pleasing recipes?
