Sweet Melissa Sundays: Fluffy Coconut Cake with Mango Filling

I would like to nominate my husband for Husband of the Year. He actually made this week's Sweet Melissa Sundays pick because I was not able to. You see, on October 7th I had surgery to remove a cancerous lump in my breast. Everything went splendidly with the surgery and we were relieved to learn the cancer did not spread. Even though I feel great all things considering, the doctor has me on strict orders to do nothing. Doing nothing isn't all it's cracked up to be. In between TV shows, movies and books I spend a lot of time surfing the web, namely food blogs in search of new ideas. My mind has been racing with new dishes and treats I would like to make. I have been itching to get back in the kitchen and it's sooooo very difficult to just sit back and watch.

Hubby has been a wonderful caretaker over the last 2 weeks...doing all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping and making sure I am following the doctors orders. On top of it all he offered to make this week's pick. What a sweetie. At 9pm on Sunday evening he pulled a chair in the kitchen where I directed him through the various steps of the recipe. The kitchen is really my domain and in the 12 years I can count on one hand the number of times he's baked sweet treats. But that didn't slow him down! He kicked butt!

We decided to do half the recipe and bake them in my new 6 inch cake pans. I'm not a passion fruit fan so we went with mango nectar instead. The filling took quite a while to thicken...more than twice as long as the recipe calls for. The white cake had a nice flavor, but the texture was not quite what other SMS bakers described. Ours turned out more like a dense pound cake than the light moist cake others experienced. But it doesn't much matter, because I had the best time "making" this cake and filling with my Hubby. The mango curd was very tasty! We didn't get to the frosting until Tuesday because I had to start radiation on Monday. Actually my mom helped out with the frosting...Hubby couldn't find sweetened cream of coconut at our grocery store, but my mom was able to find it at hers. The only problem was when she opened the can it was bad. So we resorted to plan b....coconut extract. The frosting was very tasty with a very light coconut taste. We omitted the coconut flakes because none of us care for the texture.

Here's the final product. It looks pretty, but we all agreed that taste wise it wasn't a smash hit. But the baking process this week gets an A+! Thanks honey! Thanks Mom! I love you guys.



Thanks to Karen for hosting this weeks recipe. You can find the recipe over at her blog. See how the other talented bakers in the group did here.