Mango Cake

My fam­i­ly loves man­go, and I love cake (I do, it so hap­pens, also love man­go), so it made sense to try putting the two togeth­er. The result was this love­ly man­go cake, which has man­go puree in the cake itself, the cream, and spread gen­er­ous­ly between lay­ers and on top. I must admit that I find it a bit tedious to make, but I think the end prod­uct is well-worth it and has been quite pop­u­lar with my friends and family.

You should begin by cre­at­ing the man­go puree, as you’ll need at least a lit­tle of it for essen­tial­ly every com­po­nent of the cake lat­er on. Go on to sep­a­rate the egg whites and yolks. Adding man­go to cake bat­ter (at least in my admit­ted­ly lim­it­ed expe­ri­ence) does seem to make it a bit denser, I try to add a lit­tle extra fluff wher­ev­er I can — in this case, by first beat­ing the egg whites until they form soft peaks. I usu­al­ly end up with some­thing like this:

In anoth­er large bowl, com­bine the dry ingre­di­ents — the flour and bak­ing pow­der — with a dash of salt and set aside. In yet anoth­er bowl, whisk togeth­er the egg yolks, sug­ar, milk, and vanil­la extract. 

Pour the egg yolk mix­ture over the dry ingre­di­ents and com­bine; then, gen­tly fold in the egg whites. Add about 2 table­spoons of the man­go puree here, and gen­tly fold it in. You can cer­tain­ly vary how much man­go puree you add to the bat­ter — I’ve per­son­al­ly found that adding more man­go does enhance the mango‑y fla­vor but seems to make the cake more dense. 

Grease two 6‑inch cake pans, and fill them with the bat­ter. Bake in the oven at 350° for about 20 min­utes, or until a tooth­pick comes out clean. You should get some­thing like this:

Make the cream by beat­ing a pint of heavy cream, 2 table­spoons of sug­ar and 1 table­spoon of man­go puree on high, until stiff peaks form; you’ll want them espe­cial­ly stiff if you plan on pip­ing lat­er. Once the cream is done, you can begin to assem­ble. I like to do a spread of cream below a spread of the puree between the cake lay­ers, like so:

Stack the sec­ond lay­er on top of the first, at which point you can pro­ceed to frost the entire thing. Here’s my progression: 

It looks a bit like a sand­wich here, at first, does­n’t it? Now here comes the crumb coat:

After the first coat, I usu­al­ly refrig­er­ate the cake for about an hour so that the frost­ing will set. You can apply a sec­ond thick­er coat lat­er, and do your pip­ing too if you like. I also like to pour the remain­ing man­go puree on the top, as much for taste as for dec­o­ra­tion. And here’s the fin­ished product!

I’ll be the first to admit that my cake dec­o­rat­ing skills are nonex­is­tent, so please excuse the slop­py pip­ing and cream­ing. But the cake itself is delight­ful, so by all means give it a try!