Dear fellow shoppers

Many of you might not realise but you have a lot of knowledge in your hands. I am looking for delicious coconut cake and if any of you have shopped at a bakery that offers this please tell me.I am willing to pay to ship it as I prefer fresh baked coconut cake as compared to the frozen kind available at Costco or BJ'S or any other grocery store.

Make it yourself! Start with a real, whole coconut. Select one that feels heavy for its size and you can hear the 'milk' slosh around inside. Food Network has instructions for dealing with a coconut if you have never done so. Look for the coconut cake recipes of Alton Brown. He bakes it, then uses the electric drill to open the eyes to drain it. The baking helps loosen the meat from the shell so you can shred it.

Then you need to make decisions . . . a traditional coconut cake is a white cake, but white cakes tend to be drier than yellow cakes, so I use a yellow cake. I don't mess around with making a cake from scratch but just use a cake mix. I put a little coconut extract (yes, out of the McCormick's bottle) into the cake mix before baking.

When I shred my coconut, I go for longer shreds and can either use the shredder wheel of my food processor or pull out the old hand grater. Of course you took off the dark brown inner husk on the meat with your vegetable peeler. I then add a little powdered sugar to the shreds and a little of the coconut milk, put the whole thing in a zipper plastic bag so that I can shake it up from time to time and refrigerate it until I'm ready to use it.

Then you have decisions about the icing--at our house the preference is for a simple butter cream icing, though I think the more traditional is a 7 minute icing that requires cookig. In my butter cream I use the coconut extract again instead of vanilla.

I split the two layers once they have cooled so that I have a four layer cake. I usually add what coconut milk I have left to a can of coconut milk and moisten the layers before icing. A generous layer of butter cream goes between each layer, sprinkled with a good handful of fresh coconut. Plan ahead so you still have enough coconut for the top and sides. Don't mix the coconut into the icing but rather press it in once the icing is in place.

This is a cake that needs to be refrigerated and it is always at its best the day after making it.

Outside the freezer section with such paltry offerings as Pepperidge Farm's squares, coconut cake tends to be seasonal and available from bakeries during the Christmas holidays.

Thanks flash but am not a very good baker. There must be a good bakery out there.Or do bakeries not get shopped I might be wrong.

Keep in mind that most places that get shopped are chains. If you have a chain of bakeries in your area they may be shopped. Ours here are Mom & Pop places except those in the grocery stores. Grocery stores get shopped and sometimes there may be a special request in the bakery department. My grocery store bakeries do not have coconut cake at this time of year.

One of the beauties of a cake mix is that you have very simple instructions on the box so all you need is a couple of cake pans, eggs, oil and water to produce a quite respectable cake. If you don't bake much, a fresh box to make a cake is a lot cheaper than getting together your ingredients and fresh baking powder. If you rotate your pans half way through cooking you even will end up with cakes that are about the same height on both sides. :-)

Most of us are more challenged by icing a cake. If you look at the layers you have, you can put them together such that you have a level cake. If your layers rose too much in the middle, carefully slice off the bulge and ice the bottom of the layers rather than the tops. And you don't need to split the layers if you aren't comfortable doing that, a 2 layer cake is just fine. I usually drop four plops of icing on a layer, 1 in the center and 3 equally spaced around the layer not too close to the edge. Somebody who is good at it can drop one plop in the center and pull the icing out from there evenly. I can't, but I can deal with the reinforcements along the cake as I pull the icing. Flat layers means you don't have huge gaps along the side between layers, so an icing laden spatula can do a pretty decent job of pulling the icing. And the beauty of a coconut cake is that when you pat on the coconut, all of your irregularities are well hidden.

It is worth a try if you have a hankering for it.

Coconut cake is my husband's favorite cake, with fond memories of his Mom's. Special occasions, I make him a white cake, using fresh coconut, and iced with a 7-minute frosting, topped with toasted coconut. Fresh coconut, or packaged shredded, either.

Side bar, and off thread topic: Food processor? I recently purchased my first one. Thought I'd start with a lower priced one, at $70. Everything turned to mush, even using pulse. I'm handy enough with knives, but wonder how much I would need to spend for a really good processor.

Mine is an old Kitchen Aid that I got back in the days when Luria's was closing their stores. It has grater blades, a slicer blade and of course the various little blades that fit in the bottom to pulverize stuff. I prefer a blender for the stuff I want to be mush so mostly the grater blades get used. In watching cooking shows, they are almost always using the processor for mush applications. If I had to give up a kitchen prep tool it would likely be the first out the door and I would just keep the blender.

try allrecipes. They have simple recipes.

I uses the coconut milk as part of the liquid in the cake. Delicious.