#83: Macaroon Cake
I didn’t even know that macaroon cake was really a thing. It kind of seemed like nonsense because no other cookie gets to just also become a cake (especially not you, oatmeal raisin, even cake wouldn’t improve your insidious blahness). Yet somehow, when confronted with macaroon cake as one of the items on the BA Home Cooking Essentials list, I already had a solid, thoroughly-tested recipe for one. That happens to me sometimes – I just happen to have made recipes for things that I didn’t even know were “a thing” beyond that one recipe (let me explain: I used to live somewhere where the average temperature by Remembrance Day was about -25…I know how to spend time being busy indoors).
Macaroon cake seems to mean different things to different bakers. Also to the internet, which wants desperately for you to mean ‘macaron’ cake and insists on autocorrecting and showing you photos of ostentatious layer cakes vajazzled with twee little French macarons, those foolishly adorable wafer sandwich cookies. MacarOOn cake relies heavily on the star ingredient of coconut, but other than that seems to have few rules for conducting itself. Chocolate is apparently common, perhaps because chocolate-dipped macaroons are delicious and always superior to plain macaroons. The recipe I was familiar with (“Vintage Macaroon Cake”) is basically a bundt-style chocolate cake with a fat ribbon of coconut macaroon filling running through it and a slathering of chocolate ganache poured overtop. It’s one of the most satisfying cakes to cut into as the coconut filling winds up looking like a perfect little macaroon nestled between layers of soft chocolate cake. BA’s recipe is inspired by the coconut macaroons often eaten as part of (Americanized) Passover celebrations and is truly a love letter to the feature ingredient, starring coconut in four different forms (oil, shreds, shavings, and milk). The resulting cake ends up being both gluten- AND dairy-free while still being a delicious and, *gasp* texturally-sound, masterpiece.
