Coconut cake with marscapone cream

Mmm, yeah - I know that the cake at the top of this post doesn't look very attractive. It was one of those kitchen moments that didn't quite work out as I had intended. However, despite the fact that this cake looks like someone sat on it, I have decided to post about it, because it tasted lovely, and I would like to try it again, having learned a few lessons.

The cake in question is an almond cake with marscapone cream out of Leslie Mackie's Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook. It is rich and buttery and oh so nice, but I had a couple of disasters in my attempt to make it. First of all, even though I used a 9 x 3 inch pan as stated in the recipe, the cake baked over the top of the tin, which led to a rather messy oven.

The resulting cake was an odd shape, although still usable, so I cut off the uneven top, and decided unwisely to try and cut it into two layers to fill it. This was a bad decision - the unevenness and fragility of the cake led to both layers disintegrating in parts, so I literally slapped together the marscapone cream without regard for smoothness, and glued the cake together like a jigsaw puzzle, then put it in the fridge overnight to think about what I was going to do with it.

In the morning, I took the cake out and cut a slice - and fell in love with the taste. It was absolutely awesome. I had meant it to be a farewell cake for my colleague, Barry. However, I wasn't going to give him a patched up cake for that purpose, so I made him another, plainer cake, and brought in the glued-together almond cake as a side dish. Everyone else must have agreed with my view on the taste of the almond cake, because despite its rather battered appearance, almost every crumb was eaten. And to think, I nearly threw it out!

Here is Barry's other cake, a double-layer plain vanilla cake with orange water icing, and piping in chocolate sauce:

If you wanted to have a go at the almond cake yourself, the recipe is as follows:

3 eggs
3/4 cup plain low fat yoghurt (I used vanilla strawberry - it was fine)
2 teaspoons almond extract
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 3/4 cup sugar
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups almond meal
250g butter

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees Celsius, and grease andline a 9 x 3 inch springform pan. (I found this size too small - not sure why.)

Whisk together the eggs, 1/4 cup of the yoghurt and the almond and vanilla extracts in a bowl and set aside.

Stir the sugar, sifted flour, almond meal, baking powder, baking soda and salt together in another bowl and set aside.

Cream the butter in an electric mixer for about 5 minutes. Add the flour mixture and the remaining half a cup of yoghurt, and beat at low speed until just combined. Add the egg mixture in three batches, beating in between each addition.

Pour the batter into the cake pan and bake in the oven for one hour and ten minutes until cooked through. Cool in the tin on a wire rack for an hour before unmoulding, cutting into three layers and filling. The layers are fragile, so you need to handle them with care.

As mentioned above, despite my misadventures, this cake tasted amazing. Next time, I will try baking it in three separate pans to avoid the baking over and layering issue.