Crush Cakes: Beyoncé -The Toast

Welcome to Crush Cakes. When you sit around breathlessly swooning over your crushes nonstop like me, well. We are worldly people here, you know what happens next. I make cakes expressing my feelings for them, and then sit back and wait for my destiny to be fulfilled. It all makes perfect sense.

The interesting thing about making a cake demonstrating my crush on Beyoncé is that I’m both intimidated by the prospects – it’s Beyoncé, it has to be both perfect yet exquisite – but also I’m sort of chuckling ruefully at myself too, because Beyoncé will be so literally unaffected by this entire exercise and thus it’s actually relaxingly low-stakes. Unless Beyoncé is a regular reader of The Toast, in which case, hi! *waggles glasses suggestively*

Several things were motivating the production of this Coconut Lime Cookie Mousse Cake. One: what can I find in the pantry right now. I’m currently in the process of moving house, and hot damn does that process absorb money. Two: OH MY GOSH I SHOULD DECORATE IT WITH SKITTLES IN THE MIDDLE. It is the sweetest in the middle…but this gustatorial pun might be too on-the-nose. Or elsewhere. Three: Beyoncé’s self-titled visual album is incredible, so incredible, and inspiring and wonderful and really hind-shakingly fun and once I got my hands on it, it was all I could listen to. This woman is a star.

Coconut Lime Cookie Mousse Cake To Express My Crush On Beyoncé

125g butter, melted

½ cup brown sugar

1 cup flour

1 sachet lime jelly (and here we pause to sing “Bootylicious” in its entirety) (She’s foreign. She means Jello. – Ed.)

Juice of half a lime (or a whole one, but limes are precious and expensive, use the other half in something else or just gaze upon it reverently and be too scared to use it until it dries up and becomes inedible.)

1 can coconut cream

For decoration: toasted coconut….skittles.

Mix the butter, brown sugar, and flour together till it’s all crumbly, and sprinkle it on a baking-paper lined oven tray, like into rough pinchy chunks and crumbs, you know? Bake for 15-20 minutes at 180 C/350 F till golden and crisp. Set aside while you do the rest of the stuff. Mix the jelly crystals with ¾ cup freshly boiled water, and stir to dissolve. Tip in the can of coconut cream and mix well. Refrigerate for about half an hour, then stir again. Get a springform cake-tin of 20cm or so, line it well with baking paper, tip in all the crumbled up cookie bits and then pour over the minty-green coconut mixture.

The cookie bits will disperse and suspend themselves throughout the coconut lime stuff, and you will be like okay I’ve come this far I’m just going to pretend this was part of the plan all along.

Refrigerate for a few hours till you’re quite sure it’s set, then run a knife round the outside, unclip the cake-tin from its base, and sit on a cute serving plate. Decorate as you wish, I went for toasted coconut plus lime and grape skittles, which felt…correct?

Look to be honest with you – and harder still, to be honest with myself – and hardest of all, to be honest to Beyoncé, this cake is a bit weird and I’m not entirely sure it ended up being what I’d hoped it would be. So before you go to make it, sit down and really assess how much you like coconut and fake lime flavouring plus a tiny bit of actual lime flavouring.

Overall though, it’s a compelling confection – the yielding mousse against the soft crunch of the cookies, the beachy hit of coconut and lime, all the other skittles you get to eat so you’re left with the specific colours you want…Really though, what possible cake offering could you actually give Beyoncé? Better to simply accept that nothing could be good enough so plough ahead and make something pretty dubious. So Beyoncé, if you’re out there…

Laura Vincent is the author of a fancy cookbook called Hungry and Frozen, and a food blog of the same name. She likes to dance, knit, swoon over babes, and successfully seek attention. She's from Wellington, New Zealand.

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+21 Vote up Vote down

literarysara 119p · 565 weeks ago

I love the idea of making cakes to express your feelings! I loved the pie-making sequences in Waitress too.

I made vegetable-flavored wheat thins yesterday. I suppose that adequately expresses my feelings of settling into spinsterdom, crushing on no one.

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1 reply · active 565 weeks ago

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anachronistique 115p · 565 weeks ago

The day after I saw Waitress I made a peach pie. Except it was less like I made it and more like I was compelled to, by a force outside myself.

It was delicious.

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alicia 114p · 565 weeks ago

Is this part one in a series? Fingers crossed!

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2 replies · active 565 weeks ago

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hungryandfrozen 64p · 565 weeks ago

I, for one, most definitely have more crushes up my sleeve. Also cake crumbs.

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the_lovecats 72p · 565 weeks ago

I concur.

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elsamac 121p · 565 weeks ago

Two: OH MY GOSH I SHOULD DECORATE IT WITH SKITTLES IN THE MIDDLE.

You beautiful genius.

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wallofillusion 127p · 565 weeks ago

"use the other half in something else or just gaze upon it reverently and be too scared to use it until it dries up and becomes inedible."
This is how I deal with every single ingredient that I don't manage to use up in one recipe.

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Tim · 565 weeks ago

Beautiful!
Beyonce is a Queen and certinaly deserving of such a cake, even with all that fake lime flavouring!

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britomartian 138p · 565 weeks ago

How is pink not the flavor of this cake?!

Also no cherries to tear out. I am disappoint.

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1 reply · active 565 weeks ago

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hungryandfrozen 64p · 565 weeks ago

this is a very good point and if Beyonce is all "Laura, I would've reciprocated this crush but for the glaring food pun opportunities you ignored" I am going to kick myself.

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Crush Cakes: Beyoncé

ByLaura Vincent

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