 Hey, y'all, I'm Timmy. The cameraman is Chris, my husband, and this is Collard Valley Cooks. Today, we're making our Italian cream cake. It is so delicious. It has cream cheese in the cake layers, and of course, a delicious cream cheese icing with toasted pecans and coconut. So let's get started. The first thing we're gonna do is toast our coconut and pecans. So you're gonna put your coconut in your sheet cake pan, and you're gonna toast it while you're mixing up your cake. Now, it needs to toast at 350 degrees, and you need to watch it closely. Now we're gonna put the pecans in here. You need about a cup and a half of pecans. Now, if you want to toast your coconut and pecans at different times, like if you wanna toast whole pecans so you don't get any small ones that seem to be too dark, you can do that. But now I just throw it all in there and toast it all at one time. Now as your coconut and pecans toast, you have to mix them so that they toast evenly. All right, we're gonna mix this up again. So just mix it every few minutes. You want it to have a good toasty flavor. Now we're gonna take our toasted coconut and pecans and we're gonna put them in a bowl to the side because we're gonna bake our cake in our sheet pan. This is gonna make the most delicious Italian cream cake you've ever tasted without a lot of fuss. You're gonna start with four ounces of room-temperature cream cheese. Put it in your mixer with a quarter cup of room-temperature salted butter, and you're gonna beat that until it's creamy. Now after you get this mixed up good, you'll start adding your other ingredients. We'll start with three eggs and a cup of buttermilk. I'm just gonna pour everything in here. All right, I'm gonna use a cup of buttermilk, that's whole buttermilk, if you can find it. And then a half cup of warm water, your cake mix. You're gonna mix this up for two minutes and then you're gonna add some your reserved coconut to it. So when you use the cake mix, make sure you use a white cake mix because it does make a difference in the flavor of the cake. Do not use a yellow cake mix if you want it to taste good, okay? And you may wanna scrape the sides of your bowl. I don't think there's anything on mine, but it's a good practice to do it. Now we're gonna add our reserved coconut. If you forget to reserve your coconut, you can always grab some of the topping coconut and pecans and throw in here instead. It's no big deal, okay? I used to make this at church a lot and oh my goodness, they were crazy about it. So if you really want a good cake this season for a holiday meal, this is a really good one and it's not hard. I'm using the pan that I used to toast my coconut. We're gonna make this into a sheet cake today for easy, to make it easy. I love to make layer cakes, but I know a lot of y'all, it's hard for you to do that. So I wanted to make this into a sheet cake for those of you who would rather have it in a sheet cake form and it's easy to serve as well. So I'm gonna spray my pan with baker's joy. I didn't wash out the pan after toasting the coconut and pecans because they're oily and you don't have to, okay? Okay, we're gonna get this in the oven and bake it. This is in our first cookbook and it is very popular. I have to taste the batter, mm, good. The reason I tell you to use white cake batters to make any of my cakes, whether strawberry or whatever, is because they don't have a real, they don't have as strong of a flavor as the yellow and the yellow is such a strong flavor that it really messes with if you're trying to do a specialty cake, okay? So we're gonna get this in the oven and we're gonna bake it at 350 until it's good and done. All right, so watch it and once it's done, it'll start kinda coming away from the sides a little bit. Eight ounces of cream cheese in the mixer and you put that in there with a half stick of room temperature butter and I had to zap mine a second so it wouldn't quite, I had it laid it out. All right, we're gonna cream these together. Now we're going to open some evaporated milk because we're only gonna use about a tablespoon of that and you're gonna use your toasted coconut and pecans, a little bit of that. So we'll use four and a half cups of powdered sugar. We'll fold this over so it's easy to dip into. All right, so you've got your powdered sugar. This has got your butter and your cream cheese. You're gonna use just a little bit of vanilla and a little bit of canned milk just to make it creamy. So we're gonna shake it good, open it. I'm gonna go ahead and put my vanilla in here and we'll start with a cup of powdered sugar and it's gonna take four and a half cups. Actually, I think I'll go ahead and do two cups and I need to put my shield on here because this is going to wanna make a mess. I'll do two more. We'll just go ahead and do two and a half and then this is when you're gonna add your cream because you want it to be spreading consistency. You only put in about a tablespoon. Then I tell you to add a half cup of toasted coconut and a half cup of pecans that are toasted. So what we're gonna do is just add a cup of my toasted pecans and coconut. So you add that to your icing. Now you can tell this is not as tall as my last cake because it's a cake mix and it doesn't have as much batter. So if you want it to be really thick and tall, you would have to make really two recipes. Now we're gonna ice it and I'll be taking some of this with me to sell it at the Fall Festival, just some slices of it. And I'm sure Chris will get a piece because he loves this stuff, don't you, baby? Now I'm just gonna put a little bit on the sides enough to stick the coconut and the pecans to. But this is not a thick piece of cake so I don't wanna overdo it and put too much icing on it. It's gonna make it too rich. And now what we do is make it pretty and we're gonna put it on the side here. You can actually take your parchment up and push it up there too if you want to. So you're just gonna take it and push it up against the edge like so. Good thing about using the parchment is it's easy to move it around if you need to. And I made a lot of extra. Let's put a little around the edge just to make it pretty. Now, if you wanna do it an easier way, all you gotta do is ice it in the sheet cake pan and serve it right out of the sheet cake pan, okay? If you ice it in the sheet cake pan, I would put a good bit of icing on it and then just cover it with the toasted coconut and pecans and that's all there is to it, y'all. You talk about a good Italian cream cake. This is an amazing and delicious Italian cream cake. It is really, really good. All right, we're gonna cut into this delicious cake. I'm gonna cut it right in the middle first. Has a very super soft crumb. You can look at the cake. You can see how moist it looks. Using the cake mix always makes a moist cake. It's absolutely delicious, y'all, I promise. All right, so we're gonna cut us a bite of it. Man, it's good. It's really delicious. It's super rich with that cream cheese icing. I toasted pecans and coconut. Well, you can't find a better Italian cream cake. So, y'all give it a try and let us know how much you like it. Y'all, we'll see you the next time. I sure love you and thank you for watching. Bye-bye.