Lemon Coconut Cake

How to Make a Lemon Coconut Cake

Today’s lemon cake is a moist lemon buttermilk cake with coconut folded into it. It is light, fluffy, and wonderfully moist! 

We are using the conventional mixing method (as opposed to reverse creaming) which results in a nice, soft cake- and it all comes together very easily.

**Find the full, printable recipe further down– but here is a quick rundown of the steps!

Preheat: Preheat oven (to 350 degrees f). In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt for 30 seconds to help distribute the ingredients and aerate.

Buttermilk Mixture: In another bowl, add the buttermilk, oil, lemon extract and lemon juice. Using buttermilk in the recipe is helpful as the acidity helps to soften the gluten (resulting in a softer cake)!

Butter and Sugar: In the bowl of your mixer, add the butter and mix at medium speed until smooth. Gradually add the sugar and continue to mix on medium speed for 3 to 5 minutes until fluffy and light.

Eggs: Add the room temperature eggs one at a time (We like to wait until the yellow of the yolk disappears almost completely before adding the next)

Dry and Wet Ingredients: With the mixer on low speed, alternately add the flour mixture and buttermilk mixture, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients (I did 3 additions of dry ingredients and 2 of liquid).

Shredded Coconut: Finally, fold in the shredded coconut and divide the batter between the three prepared 8 inch cake pans. 

Bake at 350 degrees for 22-24 minutes until the center of the cake springs back when lightly touched or until a toothpick comes out clean (or with just a few crumbs attached)

Lemon Curd and Coconut Whipped Cream Cheese Filling

Our moist lemon and coconut cake layers deserve to be filled with an equally luscious filling. That’s where our lemon curd and coconut whipped cream cheese filling come in!

Lemon Curd

• If you’ve never tried our Lemon Curd filling, you are going to be amazed not only by the flavor (thanks to the fresh lemon juice and lemon zest) but also by how quickly it comes together when heated in a saucepan.
• Making lemon curd is just a matter of combining white sugar, corn starch, and water in a saucepan over medium heat and then combining with the butter, egg yolks, and lemon. 
• The result is so silky smooth and wonderful! This tangy lemon curd is not overly tart- it has just the right amount of lemon to give your cakes and cupcakes a fantastic boost of lemon flavor.
• The lemon curd will thicken as it cools. 

• After spreading our cake layer with lemon curd, we followed with coconut cream cheese filling so that we could keep a balance of flavors in the filling. 

Whipped Coconut Cream Cheese Filling

We love cream cheese frosting recipes and have made many variations over the years. However, sometimes we want a lighter consistency to our frostings and fillings.

This is exactly what we wanted for today’s cake, and so we used our go-to whipped cream cheese frosting recipe and added coconut extract. We only used a teaspoon of coconut extract but you can easily adjust it to your liking!

Whipped cream cheese frosting is just a matter of whipping up heavy cream in a cold bowl (with a cold whisk attachment or beaters) on high speed until stiff peaks form. 

Then, mix the cream cheese, sugar, and flavorings and then gently combine with the whipped cream. The result is just as you would imagine– the whipped consistency is still there, but is slightly more stabilized by the cream cheese and sugar mixture. 

* While I find it difficult to frost cakes with a perfectly smooth finish when working with whipped frostings like this – it pipes great and is fine to use for textured frostings (as we tried with out Butter Pecan Cake). 

The decorating is especially easy when flaked coconut is involved! I simply frosted with coconut whipped cream cheese frosting and pressed the coconut into it. 

Assembling the Coconut Lemon Cake 

Place the first cool (or room temperature) cake layer on your cake base or cake stand.

Spread with a fairly thin layer of (cooled) lemon curd. The lemon curd at this point will have thickened to a very spreadable consistency. I like to spread softer fillings to about ¼ to ½ inch from the edge fo the cake to prevent it from escaping. 

Is it necessary to pipe a dam?

If I were using a buttercream or cream cheese (not whipped) as my frosting, I would pipe a dam of buttercream about ¼ inch from the edge of the cake layer before adding a soft filling.

However, since our soft whipped coconut cream cheese filling is going to be used as our frosting as well, and it is no thicker than our lemon curd, we are skipping the dam today. Instead, just do not take the fillings all the way to the edge of the cake. This worked well for us!

Adding the Coconut Whipped Cream Cheese Filling

Spread a layer of coconut whipped cream cheese filling on top of the lemon curd. It will spread very easily. However, remember not to take it all the way to the edge of the cake. I sprinkled a little shredded coconut on top of the Whipped Coconut Cream Cheese layer of filling but this is optional ;0) 

Stack the second layer and repeat the steps, spreading with a thin layer of lemon curd followed by the coconut whipped cream cheese frosting (and extra coconut if you like).  

Finish with the final lemon coconut cake layer. At this point, I spread the top of the cake with lemon curd, and filled in the gaps in between the cake layers with coconut whipped cream cheese frosting (applied from a disposable piping bag with the tip snipped away).

This gives us a little extra insurance that everything will stay contained.

You can see the “fill in the gaps” step in the cake photo below- you can also see that I may have gotten a little carried away with the amount of lemon and coconut filling that I used! This meant larger gaps to fill with frosting ;0)

Next, frost the cake as usual around the sides with the coconut whipped cream cheese frosting, and press coconut flakes into it. I finished off the cake with a piped border around the top edge.