It’s Presidents Day. There must be a cake for that.
I found that our current president favors coconut cake. This according to the First Lady’s tweet for President Biden’s 80th birthday last year.
When I need to know about national cake history, my go-to source is American Cake by Anne Byrn. How convenient that coconut cake appears on the cover.
Byrn’s invaluable book is organized by time period. The coconut layer cake is in the chapter entitled “New Cakes & New Directions 1800-1869.”
In the author’s words:
Stacked high with fluffy white frosting and mounds of grated coconut, the coconut cake has no equal. It isn’t just another pound cake, it is a coconut cake, by golly. And a bite brings back history and good memories, whether it was the cake your grandmother baked or the cake always served at Christmas. Coconut cakes have long been associated with the South, and they were baked in New Orleans and Charleston in the early 1800s. But they were also baked wherever Caribbean “cocoa nuts” arrived, for coconuts were just days away from ports such as Philadelphia and others along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Coconuts were good travelers because they were hard to break. Coconut was first used in candy making by French and Dutch confectioners in the 18th century before it was piled atop cake. Old Charleston records show that a pastry chef by the name of Catherine Joor had 400 pounds of coconut in her possession at her death in 1773. Coconut was a key ingredient in sponge cake (Mrs. Lettice Bryan, The Kentucky Housewife, 1839) and the Sally White fruitcake, a white fruitcake popular in North Carolina in the mid-1800s. Toward the end of the 19th century, coconut would be found in all sorts of cakes—sponge cakes, silver cakes made with egg whites, and a New Orleans Creole coconut pound cake with the freshly shelled coconut dried in the skillet before grating. Once baking powder was on hand in the American kitchen, and once cakes transitioned out of the tube pan and into layers, coconut cake became more of the cake we think of today.
Anne Byrn, American Cake: From Colonial Gingerbread to Classic Layer, the Stories and Recipes Behind More Than 125 of Our Best-Loved Cakes: A Baking Book. (United States: Harmony/Rodale, 2016), 66.
As for the recipe itself, it’s not on the author’s site, so a library or bookstore visit is necessary.
To illustrate cake’s timeless appeal, Byrn dedicates a page to presidential favorites through the centuries. “Make America Bake Again: A History Of Cake In The U.S.” conveniently reprints the page of presidential preferences.
Patriots are pro-cake. (OK, some presidents are pie guys. That’s fine). With civic duty calling, it’s time to preheat the oven.
Andrea Adleman | Cupcakologist 