Baking My Own Birthday Cake

It’s my birthday in a couple of days so I just finished making myself a coconut cake. When I was a kid, there was a little corner grocery store down the street that would get boxed coconut cakes in at Christmas time, and they had this hard icing Santa in the middle. My parents would always buy one of those cakes for me and stick some candles on it and that would be my birthday cake every year. Part of me didn’t like the Santa thing in the middle – nobody else had a Santa on their cake – they had balloons or confetti and flowers. On the other hand, that was pretty darn good cake and the only one I wanted.
This thing I made tonight is an atrocity. It is 16 inches across and about 6 inches tall because some friends are coming over to help me celebrate and I thought everyone would want a piece. I put coconut in the mix, and put coconut in the frosting: a total of two and a half bags, with each bag being 14 ounces. That’s over two pounds of coconut. Lord have mercy – the thing is lethal!
The frosting was too thick to spread, so I watered it down but got carried away. Why is it that you can add a few drops of water to thin something and it’s almost perfect, then you put one drop more and it gets runny? This happens to me a lot.
When icing is too soft, the top layer won’t stay put. It wants to glide sideways. I know this from experience. My cake isn’t doing that, though, and I think it’s because all that coconut is giving it some traction. I used two boxes of powdered sugar and two sticks of butter, and one whole bag of coconut, and there still wasn’t enough frosting to cover it. Brown cake is poking through. I think I put too much in the middle, but I needed some extra because the bottom layer looks like a dome and I was trying to fill in. I don’t know how you make a cake be flat. That’s why this cake is so tall.
Anyway, I saved a little of the frosting to decorate it, and maybe I’ll take a picture of it. My plan is to position the decorating to cover all the bare spots. Some of the icing on the top was easing down the dome and cracks were starting to form like mini San Andreas faults all over the top when I last checked it. I’m hoping sitting overnight will harden it up some.
Sorry for rambling on about this behemoth of a cake. If it tastes okay, and people eat it tomorrow night and get heart attacks from all the oils and other bad things, can I get sued? I’m going to ask my guests to sign a release before they can have a piece.