This Coconut Cake Is for Unabashed Coconut Lovers

This summer, I’ve seen coconut cake everywhere. I can’t tell if this is a phenomenon I am simply observing or secretly willing into being. One of my favorite ingredients, versatile in texture, flavor, aroma and consistency, coconut has featured in some of the best cake slices I’ve had the pleasure of inhaling and anchored some of my favorite soups and stews.

What I’ve noticed on menus is how coconut can elevate a plain white cake. A wedge at Cafe Commerce, showered with toasted coconut flakes that casts an amber glow. At Minetta Tavern, shredded coconut lifts buttercream frostings so high that the cake beneath seems like it might topple over with a gentle nudge.

And yet there are people who say that the best cake has no coconut at all, that the ingredient is flawed. All that versatility is, in its own way, a disqualification.

I know that, by sharing a coconut cake recipe with readers, I won’t be convincing anyone who doesn’t like coconut. But I wanted to understand this divisiveness.

I turned to coconut-averse friends and colleagues for answers: The mouth feel of raw and shredded coconut turns off Chassidy David, a junior video production coordinator at The Times. “There’s like a drying sensation that I feel when I eat coconut,” she said. “It gets in between my teeth. I feel like I’m just chewing for a very long time.”

To Kiki Aranita, a chef and food writer based in Philadelphia, coconut is a staple ingredient; raw coconut, coconut milk and coconut cream excite her as ingredients. Processed coconut, on the other hand, does not. “I am perpetually confused by coconut flakes,” she said. “They don’t taste like coconut to me.”

Tanya Sichynsky, a New York Times Cooking senior staff editor who writes The Veggie newsletter, said that, to her, the smell was almost inseparable from the lotions, perfumes and sunscreens she used as a child. The texture also elicits her aversion: “It’s neither gooey nor crunchy,” she said, adding, “I think it is entirely because my only touch point for coconut until I was an adult was Almond Joy.”

To me, coconut cake is a particularly American phenomenon. I had never encountered this dessert staple until I moved to the United States from Nigeria. To understand its history, I spoke to Ken Albala, an American food historian, author and professor at the University of the Pacific.

According to Dr. Albala, coconut is a category unto itself. “I think coconut defies description,” he said. “It tastes like coconut.”

He continued: “There’s nothing even vaguely comparable. Like most nuts, coconut is high in fat, but when eaten raw, it’s oddly light and refreshing.”

In Britain and later the United States, coconut arrived along with bananas and fresh pineapples in roughly the 1880s and ’90s as a luxury of expanding trade. Soon, coconut palms, a tall, leaning tree that thrives in warm climates with porous soil, were planted along the coasts of South Florida, Hawaii and U.S. territories like the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Candy bars like Bounty and Almond Joy followed. Grocery stores began stocking sweetened, shelf-stable coconut flakes, which could be easily added into desserts, and, with the arrival of leavening agents, light and fluffy cakes.

According to Clare de Boer, an English-born chef and writer who serves a coconut cake at her Hudson Valley restaurant, Stissing House, the mildness of coconut is its greatest asset. “The cake shouldn’t dial the sweetness beyond what the ingredient can bear,” she said.

Her goal in developing her cake was to make it “extraordinarily light” with a flavor “as ethereal as the texture: a complete sensory match, tasted rather than smelled.” She believes this intricate balance of aroma, flavor and sweetness is what makes her coconut cake so popular.

So why am I not sharing her recipe for a cake that delicately incorporates just the subtlest touch of coconut? It is, by her admission, highly labor intensive, often requiring two sets of hands to bring it to fruition. “The simplicity belies the insane method behind it — and it’s also highly perishable,” she said.

Wanting something to replicate in my home kitchen, I went searching for another example. Something for those of us who love coconut desserts that are in no way shape or form subtle.

For that, I spoke to Dria Atencio of the bakery Salty Lunch Lady’s Little Luncheonette in Ridgewood, Queens. She takes a whimsical approach to nearly everything — the restaurant’s website has molded Jell-O floating across the screen — and her dessert menu is packed with indulgences like salted chocolate chunk cookies, layer cakes, cream pies, Pavlova and icebox cakes. The arrival of mango season in June inspired her superb coconut and mango layered cake. A few weeks later, I reached out to discuss its magic.

Ms. Atencio loves the flavor of coconut, but none of the coconut cakes she’s tried have enamored her. If a chocolate cake could be chocolate throughout, she thought, why not do the same with coconut? Her take on coconut cake is delicately sweet and balanced with a subtle tang from sour cream in the batter and a light, fluffy cream cheese frosting.

What she calls “mango party,” a clever mixture of fresh tart mango curd and chunky mango jam, divides the layers of white cake. Her love for her grandmother’s playful confections inspired the sweetened coconut in the batter and as a finishing sprinkle. The coconut is everywhere all at once.

Here is an ethereal version, meant for those who love the humble coconut in all forms. I don’t expect that it will change anyone’s mind, but it is a moment to pause and acknowledge. It is a celebration of how coconut can seize the conversation and loudly fill a room, so to speak.

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