 Today I'm putting together a fresh coconut cake. This is truly a family favorite on the Benefield side. And I believe the Howard's liked it too. And I have introduced Chris's family to it a little bit for a fresh coconut. Now, I made my layers several days ago and I told you all about how you can freeze them. I just took them out of the freezer. Because if you use the 8 inch layer, it sits down in here very well. And the soupiness of my soggy coconut will be able to be caught by this container. Now, just try to find something in your kitchen kind of like this to put your fresh coconut in. Don't ever put it on a flat plate like this where it's going to run all over the place and get in your refrigerator because you want it to be good and soggy and delicious, okay? Now, the first thing we're going to do is this is fresh coconut. You get it in the frozen section at the grocery store. It is not anything like flaked coconut. And you can't throw it out in the microwave or it will sour. And it usually takes about one of these sleeves per layer. The thing we're going to do is make our buttercream. And when I make buttercream, instead of using margarine, I use cream of coconut. Now, it's not coconut milk. This is coconut milk. This is cream of coconut. Coconut has a lot of sugar and stuff in it already, okay? You get it in the, it's in the Hispanic, on the Hispanic aisle normally. Because when you open the can, it's got coconut oil on the top so it won't come out. It's tough and hard. So you have to break the seal with a spatula and pour it in a bowl. Now, that oil that's on the top is what I want to use in my icing. We're going to take the oil that we have off of our cream of coconut. We're going to put it in the mixer. We're going to take a stick of butter and put it in the mixer. I'm going to put in a little bit of vanilla and I'm going to start mixing this up together. And you're probably thinking, well, why not just use coconut oil if I have some? Well, you could, except that we're going to use, um, we're going to use some of the liquid in here too to thin it up. And four cups of powdered sugar, y'all. I wish I had my good scooper dooper. It's in the dishwasher. A scooper like this, this is a half cup. Watch how easy it is. It fits down in the edge. We're going to take some of this cream of coconut and we're just going to pour it in there. I need to lock my top. Because you want this to be a little bit thin. That's okay. I'm putting just a dash of salt in it. Alright, that's about how you want it like that. It needs to be a little bit runny. So that's pretty and creamy and it's just the right consistency. That you would want to use. Because you don't want to just put a whole lot of buttercream on a coconut cake. Now when I was a little girl, when mama made her coconut cake, she used seven minute icing. Now in order to do seven minute icing, you have to have a hand mixer. And you have to make it on the stove top. And I don't even own a hand mixer. Okay, now we're going to take our coconut. And we are going to add the rest of our can of cream of coconut into our coconut. So whatever you don't use in your icing, you're going to put down in your coconut. And you're also going to use some coconut milk. Now this coconut milk has oil on the top of it as well. See, when you open it up. But I don't want the oil in my coconut. So I'm going to break the seal on both sides so that I can pour it. And I'm going to pour some of the coconut milk into my coconut. And I'm going to mix it up. You got to use your hands y'all. And you want it to be good and moist. And so when you pick this up, it needs to be good and wet. It's good. Now, when I was young, mama couldn't afford all this fancy stuff like the cream of coconut and the coconut milk. See what you sugar water. And I know a lot of y'all know what I'm talking about. Too sweet in her fresh coconut. Now when you're using buttercream, there's no reason why your coconut needs to be that sweet. Matter of fact, it's better if it's not. So I'm going to put just a little bit more of this in here. Because the wetter it is, the more it's going to soak down in the layers. Now some people like to put a filling in between their layers. You can make lemon curd and do it. That's what the richest coconut cake was years ago that they sold in the Riches Atlanta department store. So you're going to split your layer, peel off that bottom parchment, get your pan, put it down in the bottom. What I'm going to do today, just for fun, is I'm going to pour just a little bit of coconut milk on this layer. And then I'm going to take a dollop of buttercream. And you don't want to put a whole big thick layer on it because you don't want it to be so sweet they can't really eat it. And then we're going to take this and put a nice coconut, fresh coconut in between the layer. Okay, now we're going to take the other one, put it here. And I'm not going to put that liquid on this one because when they're split in the middle they soak it in better. This is the top part of it. I'm just going to ice it with the buttercream and push it over to the side like this. Take your spatula and then ice from what you push over the edge. Okay, that's how you ice a cake the easiest way. And you don't want to just have tons of buttercream on this cake because it's so full of good stuff anyway. You see the edges of the cake a little bit because we're about to coat it with coconut. Okay, so I'm going to kind of flatten the top a little bit. And now I'm just going to pile the rest of the coconut on the top of it y'all. Make sure you get the top real pretty and then finish off your sides. Make sure you have, see I think I opened five packs and some packs are smaller than others. They sell in a store. So I'm going to take the coconut and I'm going to put it all over the side too. And don't be afraid to press it into the cake y'all. It ain't going to hurt it. See why you want something deep like this? I actually need it. I put so much coconut in the middle of that right now. I'm going to push just a little bit of this over the edge to finish this little spot on the side. But this is going to be a yummy cake. Okay, don't want a piece. Make sure you get plenty of coconut on it. If you don't then open another pack. Pull a sugar in it. You can even decorate the top with just a fresh pack without even filling it full of sugar and stuff just to make it pretty. If you just want to do your sides first y'all. I'm going to wrap this up with wrap. We're going to put it in the refrigerator and we're going to have it. I'm going to serve half of it to Chris's family. Because this goes a long way. Believe it or not, it really does. It's very rich. We're going to use half of it at my family's. I'm actually taking half of a carrot and half of a coconut to each family's function. Because there's no sense in overdoing it y'all and having a bunch of junk left over. Plus I got my cherry cheese cake pie made. I'm sure she'll have candy made. When I lay them out too cool, I put them on parchment paper. I flip them upside down and then I just wrap them with plastic wrap. Like this. So then when you get ready to do your cake, all you gotta do is unwrap your cake layers. And you don't have to do everything all in one day. Now these are very fresh. Even if they're frozen, cake freezes very well. So we're going to split those layers in a minute. Now we're going to use a glass container that's deep to hold this cake. So one reason I like to do my fresh coconut with an 8 inch layer instead of a 9 inch refrigerator. If you want to do it and that's all you've got, then use something like this. But then you're going to have to send it down inside of like a sheet cake pan. And store it in the refrigerator and it's going to take a lot more room to store. When you've got a lot of cooking to do at Christmas. First tip, you've got to be real careful with this stuff because you can't make people sick. You don't want to serve them any sour coconut. If for some reason you open a pack and it doesn't smell good, don't use it. Smell it. It should smell real. You can't hardly even smell anything but just a real light hint of coconut. If there's any kind of odor at all, then you've got a sour bag, okay? Put that in the stream. You could do that. I had somebody ask me the other day, could they make a pineapple filling to go in between the layers? I thought that sounded really good. And I said, sure, you can put anything in between the layers if you want to. But now my family just likes the plain old coconut. So let me rinse my hands off and we're going to start putting this cake together. All right. So we're going to start with our first layer. We've got a container that's deep. I need to slice this layer. I can't slice it inside that container. Now, if you really want to do a good job slicing your cake layers, there is some tips that you can use that I never use. And that is, you can tell these are crooked. I made them in my old oven, y'all. But you can put a toothpick in the center and go all the way around with a toothpick and then use the toothpick as a guide to split the layer. Like those people that do those cakes that have lots of layers like the torts, they don't split all those layers. What they do is they put like a cup of batter in one cake pan and they bake three for about 10 minutes. They take them out of the oven. They flip those out and they bake some more. They flip them out. And so all they have to do is ice those little thin layers and it's easy. So they're not splitting a lot of layers to make those little tort cakes. But just take your, I always use a bread knife. And when they're frozen, they're even easier to cut.