I hate coconut but I love the idea of those vanilla cakes showered with coconut and in the shape of little lambs for Easter.

You know what I’m talking about, right? My grandmother had these molds that turned plain vanilla cake into a farm scene. The lamb shaped cake was then slathered in frosting and fistfuls of shredded coconut. I honestly don’t remember anyone ever eating the cake during all of those childhood Easter Sundays but the lamb cake was a fixture for years. There was also once a purple Barney the dinosaur cake but it wasn’t an Easter dessert and I think we actually ate it.

Memories taste delicious but coconut still doesn’t. It reminds me of eating sunscreen and I love a sunny day at the beach but not in my mouth. White chocolate, now that’s a different story. When grated it looks just like the offending coconut but doesn’t ruin a dish like sand in your sandwich does.

White chocolate is pretty sweet but the zing of lemon in the cake adds balance. A bed of blueberry preserves cushions a second cake layer and then the whole thing is hidden underneath vanilla buttercream and the white chocolate.

The batter for the lemon cake is a twist on a vanilla cake recipe but I decreased the sugar to compensate for the sweetness in the frosting and chocolate, and added a pile of lemon zest and bunch of juice. The only thing that really caught me off guard about the recipe was the five eggs that were incorporated into the batter.

The two sticks of butter are also much but remember this makes a two layer lemon cake or two dozen lemon cupcakes, so the butter is spread out. I think next time I’d add more zest to bring out the lemon flavor even more.

If you’re making this recipe as a cake or cupcakes you need to let the cakes cool before dealing with the jam and frosting. Once cool you then spread a half cup of jam across one cake layer. You should do this on whatever you’re going to serve the cake because it’s going to get hard to start moving the cake once you start adding things. Then place the second cake layer on top of the jam.

If making as cupcakes: Use a small paring knife to cut a divot into the cupcake and fill with a teaspoon of jam and replace the top.

The frosting is a basic buttercream but I again dialed back the sugar to compensate for the sweetness of the white chocolate. The finished cake is on the sweeter side so instead of slathering the vanilla buttercream all over the lemon cake you could only do the top or go thinner on the sides so the cake layers peek out a little bit.

I went crazy and added all of the frosting but would probably hold back next time and maybe only add half. I also ate this for breakfast so that might have helped shock my taste buds with sweetness.

Initially I wanted to cover the cake with grated chocolate so it still looked like the coconut flakes on the original lamb cake but wasn’t gross coconut. I put the white chocolate in the freezer for 15 minutes to get the chocolate really cold so it wouldn’t come apart and melt when it met the grater.

Well this worked and grating the chocolate made for really fine flakes but it took forever and I have no patience.

So I switched to roughly chopping the chocolate. The texture is going to be different and it will look different but it’s not wrong. The grated chocolate looks a little more refined and the chopped chocolate is “rustic” aka a little messy but you say it’s supposed to be that way!

Most food I make looks more rustic than refined but it still tastes good.

Whatever you do with the chocolate, either grate or chop, pat the top and sides of the cake with the chocolate so it sticks to the frosting. Again, my chocolate patting skills lean more towards rustic instead of refined so some parts of the cake have patchy bits of chocolate and other sections are overloaded. But I’m sure you’re much more capable of putting chocolate on a cake and if you’re not, it will look fine.