Pineapple Brush Stroke Cake

Tami and my parents have been up visiting for the past two weeks! It always feels like it has been too long since the last time I saw them, even if it has only been a month...

This time around, my parents went up to the Tetons to take pictures for the first week while Tami chilled with my family and I. Although we already had a few fun things we wanted to do during the week, most of the time we ended up searching for housing for her at BYU. After lots of online searching, touring, and calling, we finally found her a place that she'll love! And it even has two bathrooms! Which is actually a pretty big deal for an apartment with 6 girls in it...

With that goal accomplished, we were ready to start on the next one: making a pineapple brushstroke cake!

I've wanted to try out a brushstroke cake for a while and after Tami got on board with the idea, she found a super cool one designed to look like a pineapple!

To keep with the tropical theme, we made a coconut cake by adding coconut extract to a vanilla cake recipe. To make the flavor a bit stronger next time, I'd probably try it again and substitute coconut milk for some of the liquids in the recipe.

To go along with the cake, we made a pineapple filling and iced the whole thing with coconut frosting which we made from substituting coconut extract for the vanilla extract in a vanilla buttercream recipe (or at least we would have had I not forgotten to take out the vanilla extract and added it anyway along with the coconut one... Oops! Haha!)

For the brushstrokes, we used yellow and dark green candy melts that we spread out on pieces of wax paper using an icing spatula.

We actually started this cake by making the pineapple filling on Thursday, but with everything else going on... *ahem* USWNT *ahem* (Thanks to Tami and Julia, I am a new world cup fan!) we didn't actually finish the cake until Sunday. And even then, we were rushing to finish it before Tami and my mom headed down to see my Grandma Cail so we didn't have time to do a crumb coat. That and the fact that we're in the middle of summer right now left the cake slightly droopy after a little while...

In the end, Tami did a great job of icing and decorating the cake! It looked really cute and was fun to make together! The super sweet pineapple filling combined with the sweet coconut icing seemed like a bit much though. Just a few bites and all I wanted was a large glass of milk! Next time, I think a pineapple filling that's a little tart like fresh pineapple might be a better choice... I guess you never know until you try!

This next week we have the 4th of July, John's birthday, and some camping ahead of us, so that can only mean one thing... more cake! Haha! And also, praying we survive the bears... finger's crossed!