A slice of travesty

Yesterday’s exotic cake did not turn out well. I gave two reasons for this yesterday.

I left the cake overnight with the plan to ice it today.

On tasting the resulting concoction confection, I have realised there were more problems.

The biggest problem is that replacing all the butter with coconut oil results in a weird texture, like eating raw solidified coconut oil. A better approach would substitute less butter.

The lack of moisture and sufficient baking powder produced a dense cake, and the coconut oil made it particularly brittle. Cutting it in half was difficult: I ended up with some pieces from the the bottom and from the top that I could almost piece together to make a whole cake.

Other problems resulted from my lack of skill and preparation.

I didn’t have enough coconut oil to make the buttercream with, so I used a mixture of the coconut and fake butter to make it. That turned out quite nice, and still has a coconut flavour.

I whizzed up some mango purée from mango and a hint of lime juice (from a bottle – I’m not that fancy) and layered it on top of the buttercream that I’d carefully spread on what you could call the bottom layer of the cake.

I whizzed up some pineapple. I was going to make the icing by mixing it with icing sugar, but I didn’t have enough icing sugar. I really should have bought some pineapple juice for this. And some more icing sugar.

I blitzed some fresh coconut, thinking it would turn into a cream that I could mix in the pineapple goop, but it came out in bits like not-desiccated desiccated coconut. I mixed some in the pineapple icing in the hope it would help make a more icing-like icing. It didn’t.

I carefully spread the loosely icing-like substance on top of the cake, then drizzled some of the remaining pineapple purée mixed with icing sugar on top.

I put it in the fridge to set for a while, then invited Mr Pandammonium for a cup of tea and a slice of travesty.