I’m Baking Coconut Cakes, and I’m Baking Them Indian Style.

That’s because I have no counter space and have to sit on the floor. Ba dum bum.

Still there? Cool. So, the new kitchen is taking some getting used to. I have no counter space. That is not an exaggeration. In my old apartment, if I needed to reach something on the top shelf of a cabinet, I’d climb onto a tabletop and grab my prize. Here, I would have to find a way to straddle the stove in order to reach anything up high. If you know me, you know I will not be able to find a way that does not involve burning my lower half somehow. So, if you happen to see a recipe for a Brown Bottom Roast in the next couple of weeks, you’ll know why. You’ll also know not to make that particular dish yourself.

So even though I’ve been spending quite a bit of time getting to know my kitchen floor a little better, baking in the new place has been fun. My boyfriend painted the space a really pretty colonial blue– it was piss yellow before (I’m convinced that if you walk into Benjamin Moore and ask for the color “piss yellow,” they will hand you a bucket of the repulsive grime that coated our walls, even though they should probably just flush it all to hell)– so now sometimes I even bake when I’m not sad! What?!*

Anyway, this past weekend, we had a housewarming party that God decided to decorate with the first real snow of the winter. That meant that we were frantically running around in slippery, sleet-y weather getting together last-minute necessities. It also meant that one of us slipped and fell on her brown bottom [roast] and cursed the gallon of milk that anchored her to the ground for a good couple of minutes. Then she went home, cried, shook and churned out some mini coconut cakes for the party. Then they both got ready, ate cheese, drank wine, and partied, and everyone lived happily ever after forever. The End. Let’s do this!

Mini Coconut Cakes (makes 24 individual cakes, or an 8-inch round cake if you prefer)

3/4 cup of sugar

1/2 cup of all-purpose flour

1 1/2 cups of dried coconut (you can use sweetened or unsweetened, but I used sweetened because I had a ton left over from my fat bunny cake, and because it’s yummy)

4 large egg whites

Pinch of salt

1 stick (8 tablespoons) of melted and slightly cooled butter

2 tablespoons of finely grated lemon zest

2 tablespoons of sweetened dried coconut for sprinkling over the batter

Preheat your oven to 375ºF, and grease a 24-cup mini muffin tin. Meanwhile, in a medium-sized bowl, combine sugar, flour and coconut, then set aside. In a separate large bowl, whisk together egg whites and salt until smooth, then add in butter and lemon zest and stir until fully combined. Add dry ingredients into the bowl of wet ingredients, a little at a time, until fully incorporated. The mix should look a little lumpy and soggy, which is exactly what you want anything you make to look like:

Using a teaspoon, spread batter evenly among muffin tins, and then send this into the oven until the tops are deeply golden, which should take about 15 minutes. I’d also rotate the pan about halfway through cooking, unless you want some uneven toasting, like this:

Turn these out onto a rack and let them cool completely before enjoying. Seriously, they’re much better when they’ve cooled, mostly because your tongue’s not burnt. Once cooled, these were a pretty big hit. This was actually the second batch that I’d made in two days, because a good portion of the first batch had mysteriously vanished from the kitchen. Methinks the new walls have a healthy appetite for coconut…

*Not to worry, I’m still a grump. I still give rude commuters dirty looks, and I still hate Christmas. Some things will never change. Like the name of this blog, no matter how pretty our kitchen is now (sigh, it’s so pretty…). Pinky promise.