This Coconut Cake Is Better Than Your Grandmother's
Excerpted from Hartwood by Eric Werner and Mya Henry (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2015. Photographs by Gentl & Hyers."

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Food

This Coconut Cake Is Better Than Your Grandmother's

This coconut cake recipe hails from a restaurant in the middle of one of Mexico's lushest jungles, and tastes so much better than the version your grandmother makes.

Calling all fellow coconut heads, we have found your next buttery, moist, toasty, and coconutty thing to obsess over. It comes to us in the form of a toasted coconut cake sourced deep from within the Mexican caribbean coastal jungles, Tulum, Quintana Roo to be exact. Sure, you've probably had many coconut cakes before. Maybe you consider your great grandmother's recipe as the penultimate, but does her's involve some hooch and lime juice?

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Make: Hartwood's Toasted Coconut Cake

That's where Eric Werner of Hartwood, a restaurant that is literally located in the middle of one the thickest tropical jungles in Latin America, is bringing your dessert game to the next level. His brand new cookbook Hartwood: Bright, Wild Flavors from the Edge of the Yucatán recounts such Gilligan's Island-like tales as monkeys snagging the kitchen's banana stash and hungry bats gnawing away at their ripe papayas alongside amazing recipes that use the jungle's bounty. His toasted coconut cake transcends other recipes with the addition of some unusual suspects. The secret to the batter includes coconut oil, rich coconut, lime juice, and rum that lend it its luscious, moist texture. And yes, you can use your leftover coconut cream to make yourself some piña coladas.