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Cocoanut Cubes
Use recipe for Bride's Cake (see recipe on Page 175). Bake in a sheet. When cool cut in two-inch cubes and cover each cube with Boiled Frosting; sprinkle thickly with fresh grated cocoanut.
This is an assembly note rather than a standalone recipe: it depends on the book's Bride's Cake and Boiled Frosting, and everything that can go wrong lies in those two.
- What Bride's Cake meansGenerally a white butter cake leavened partly by stiffly beaten egg whites, with no yolks and no spice, so the crumb stays pale; the book's own recipe on page 175 should be checked rather than assumed. Any modern white layer-cake batter behaves much the same way in a sheet.
- Bake in a sheetUse a half-sheet or a 9x13 pan lined with parchment; the cake will be shallow. No oven temperature is given here; around 350F suits a white sheet cake, and a batter risen on egg whites will fall if the oven is opened early.
- Cubes are really squaresA shallow sheet cake will not give true two-inch cubes. Cut two-inch squares and accept the height you have, or bake in a deeper pan and trim.
- Boiled FrostingThis is a sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, 238-240F, beaten into stiff egg whites. It sets with a thin crust over a marshmallow interior, which is what holds the coconut in place; a butter icing will not do the same job.
- Work fast once it is beatenBoiled frosting stays spreadable for only a few minutes. Have the cake cut, the squares spaced out on a rack over a tray, and the coconut grated and ready before the syrup goes into the whites.
- Fresh grated cocoanutThe original means a whole coconut, cracked, drained and grated on a box grater, which gives moist white shreds with almost no sweetness. Packaged sweetened flake is drier, coarser and much sweeter; unsweetened desiccated coconut is closer in flavour, and frozen grated coconut from an Asian or Latin grocer is closest of all.
- Cutting cleanlyChill or at least fully cool the cake before cutting, and use a long serrated knife wiped between cuts. Crumbs dragged into boiled frosting show badly against the white.
- Yield and keepingA 9x13 sheet gives roughly two dozen two-inch squares. Boiled frosting weeps and coconut dries out, so these are best eaten the day they are made.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era of the American cooking-school manual, when a compiler would set out a year of menus and then cross-reference the components so that one master cake batter served a dozen purposes. Coconut Cubes are exactly that economy at work: the same Bride's Cake cross-referenced to page 175 is baked flat, cut up and sprinkled with coconut to become an afternoon-tea sweet. The white-on-white pairing of boiled frosting and grated coconut was strongly associated with weddings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grating a coconut was real labour, which is part of why the instruction to sprinkle thickly reads as a small extravagance rather than a throwaway.