Home › Date-Cocoanut › Cocoanut Cakes
Cocoanut Cakes
Mix together one-half pound of flour; one-fourth pound each of butter and sugar, and two eggs. Add a small cup of milk (of the cocoanut, if possible) and one teaspoonful of baking-powder. When well mixed add grated or desiccated cocoanut, a cupful or more as desired, then bake in small buttered tins in a moderately quick oven.
A plain pound-cake-style batter carrying as much coconut as you care to add. The only real decisions are what liquid you use and how hot the oven runs.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups (225 g). A quarter pound each of butter and sugar is one stick (115 g) and a generous half cup (115 g). Weighing gives a far more consistent crumb than scooping.
- "A small cup of milk"Read this as roughly 6 fl oz. The batter should be thick enough to drop from a spoon, not pour; hold back a little liquid until you have added the coconut, which absorbs some.
- "Milk of the cocoanut"In this period that means the thin, sweetish water inside the nut, not the pressed coconut milk sold in cans. Either works here; canned coconut milk gives a richer, denser cake, coconut water a lighter one closer to what the author intended.
- Desiccated coconutDesiccated coconut of this period was generally unsweetened and finely shredded, though sweetened shredded coconut was also on sale. Modern bagged sweetened flake is both sweeter and wetter; if you use it, cut the sugar back by a couple of tablespoons.
- "Moderately quick oven"Roughly 375-400°F. Small cakes want the higher end so they set before the coconut on the surface scorches; check at 15 minutes and expect 15-20 in all.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon of baking powder for 1¾ cups of flour is modest by current practice, and older baking powders were not always reliable. Two teaspoons gives a lighter cake, though too heavy a hand with baking powder can leave a faint chemical taste.
- Method the recipe leaves outCream the butter and sugar first, beat in the eggs, then alternate the flour and liquid. Mixing everything at once, as the wording suggests, produces a heavier, more biscuit-like cake.
- Tins and yield"Small buttered tins" means patty pans or gem tins, near enough to a modern muffin tray. Yield depends on tin size; expect somewhere around 16 to 20 small cakes, filling the cups about two-thirds.
Coconut moved from a curiosity to a pantry staple in the second half of the nineteenth century, once mechanical shredding and drying made packaged desiccated coconut cheap and shelf-stable in Britain and the United States. Before that a cook had to buy a whole nut, crack it, drain it and grate the meat by hand, which is why this recipe still offers "grated or desiccated" as alternatives and treats the water inside the nut as a resource worth using rather than discarding. The batter itself is an old proportional cake formula scaled by weight, of the kind that predates standardised cup measures: fat and sugar at half the weight of the flour, eggs to bind, liquid to loosen.