Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Coconut-Buttermilk Pound Cake, found over at MarthaStewart.com. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was my choice. I don’t remember for sure where I found it, but it’s a safe bet that it was either on Pinterest or in Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food magazine. I like pound cake, I like coconut – how can you go wrong?

Remember, this is ME we’re talking about. I can always find a way to go wrong, though I do prefer to blame the recipe whenever possible.

Ingredients:

Butter, flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, vanilla extract, eggs, buttermilk, toasted coconut, confectioner’s sugar. I should totally do a picture montage of that rum bottle of vanilla extract and how quickly it’s going down.

First thing you’ve gotta do is toast the coconut. Throw it on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, and bake at 350ºF for 5 – 10 minutes, stirring every couple of minutes. You’ve got to stay your ass in the kitchen and watch this stuff, because it burns in like half a second. BE VIGILANT, y’all. PS: Toasted coconut is SO DAMN GOOD. If you want to just take your bowl of toasted coconut and your bottle of “vanilla extract” and go consume them both at this point, I won’t tell on you.

Butter and flour (or spray with baking spray) a loaf pan. This is where I hit my first roadblock. I had a hissy fit because the directions specified a 4 1/2-by-8 1/2-inch loaf pan. When I got out the tape measure to make sure I had the right size loaf pan – AND I HAVE A LOT OF LOAF PANS – all of them were too big. I yelled, I stomped, I swore, and then I realized that you’re supposed to measure the BOTTOM of the loaf pan, not the top.

WHATEVS. You’d think Martha Stewart could have taken time out from her busy schedule of cleaning the bathroom grout with a toothbrush to MENTION that fact. Damn you, Martha Stewart. DAMN YOU.

Whisk together your flour, baking powder, and salt.

Cream your butter and granulated sugar on medium high until light and fluffy. Martha says that’s going to take about 8 minutes, but I think Martha’s been inhaling too many paint fumes. I mean, I DID let the mixer run for 8 minutes, but I do not believe it takes that long to cream together butter and sugar, and you’re not going to convince me otherwise. NO, YOU ARE NOT.

Add vanilla and then eggs, one at a time, and combine. Scrape down the sides of your bowl occasionally. WHATEVER, MARTHA.

Put your mixer on low and then add flour in three batches, alternating with two half-cup additions of buttermilk. You know what? Flour’s still going to fly everywhere. Good luck with stopping that from happening. Even the pouring shield won’t stop the flying of flour. FUCKING Martha.

Then take your bowl off the mixer and mix in 1 1/4 cups of toasted coconut, using a rubber spatula. Oh really, Martha? MUST it be a rubber spatula? What if I want to use a spoon? What if I want to use my hands? WHAT IF I WANT TO USE A CAT?

“Bitch, don’t even. I’ma cut you.”

So mix your coconut in.

Again, if you were to take that bowl of batter and go off and eat it (with a “vanilla extract” chaser), you might be happier in the end.

Dump your batter in the loaf pan.

Here is where the real problem came in. MARTHA said that the cake should be ready to take out of the oven at 60 minutes. I tested it with a toothpick, and it wasn’t done. Another 5 minutes? Not done. Another 5? Nope. It took an additional FIFTEEN FUCKING MINUTES past the one-hour mark until that cake was done. FUCKING MARTHA.

Why, that doesn’t look dry at ALL, does it?

Let your dry brick of cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for an hour, then remove it from the pan and let it cool completely on the wire rack. When it’s been like six years and you just want to get the friggin’ cake MADE, mix buttermilk and confectioner’s sugar together.

I used a measuring cup to do the mixing because that made it easier to do the next step, which was to drizzle the glaze over the top of the cake, and then sprinkle the remaining toasted coconut atop that.

Lookit that fancypants of a sawdust cake. It’s like one of those cakes that looks pretty and tastes meh.

The verdict? That fucking cake was REALLY DRY. The middle of the cake was a lot better than the ends, go figure. We didn’t immediately feed it to the chickens, but once the middle of the cake was gone, we did. The chickens ate it, because they’ll eat any damn thing.

I don’t even care where it all went wrong – I have no desire to ever make this stupid cake again, you hear me, MARTHA?

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Nance’s Take:

Nance has no take. Nance is a slacker because she and Rick drove down here to visit us, and she’s still trying to catch up at home.

I guess I can’t blame her – I know that for every one day you’re away from home it takes three days to recover, so I’m sure she’s neck-deep in laundry and vacuuming and whatnot.

Next week, however, she better pony up with the tandem cooking shit (since the next recipe was HER choice, after all), or I’m going to sic Shirley AND Felina on her ass. You hear me, NANCE?

(No, we did no in-person tandem cooking because (1) Nance knows that I never get to go out to eat unless someone has come to visit so we went out to eat a lot, and (2) It was a last-minute trip, and we both suck at planning, and (3) We just wanted to hang out and shoot the shit, which we did and it was exactly what I needed!)