Try Making Magnet Fréda’s Delectable Coconut, Rum & Tamarind Cake At Home

Decadently laden with cream cheese frosting in every colour imaginable, infused with diverse flavours from tamarind and balsamic, to lavender, black pepper and raspberry, chef-artist Magnet Fréda’s mesmeric cakes come encrusted with everything from sumptuous slices of pink, white and black dragon fruit, glistening pomegranate seeds and shaggy rambutans, to fragrant sprigs of sage and vibrant blooms of all sorts. The talented culinary creative expands on their practice and shares with Something Curated the recipe for their delightful Coconut, Rum and Tamarind Cake. The below are their words.

I’m a first-generation Haitian and my mom is Creole, so culturally, food has always been a huge part of my life. I’ve never been to Haiti, but as a child we would have family come visit during holidays and my mom and aunts would always cook together and host dinners. It felt like such a sacred and valuable thing to me, those communal eating experiences specifically, because there were so many rich, distinct Caribbean flavours and swapping of recipes and food secrets and stories being shared about our homeland – and I could taste it. I could taste those memories and I feel like it really fed a part of me that felt distanced from the life-ways of my ancestors because I was born in the United States. When I got older and came out as trans, I lost that connection to my bio family. That’s when I feel like food really began to have a more puissant authority in my life, because I was able to use food, specifically foods native to the Caribbean, as a vessel for healing of that specific grief and trauma. I feel like I was really thrown the rope of love by being able to engage with food in that way. 

I’m currently working on another full-length poetry book that will also function as a cake recipe book – think Dorothy Iannone’s A Cookbook meets Carrie Mae Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series. I’m really excited and hoping to have it completed by this fall. It’s going to be full of my own personal recipes. I’m really wanting to highlight the beauty and brilliance of food and the way that it is always there to invite us back home. And cakes, which are shared in times of celebration, reinforce the power of interdependence and community, which allows for survival. I always think about what flavours bring me closer to home and I feel like this particular cake embodies that. It’s a coconut rum cake with tamarind cream cheese frosting and I used activated charcoal for the colouring. Also the aesthetics of the actual cake and being able to make art that people can ingest feels really special – there’s something poetic about it.

Coconut, Rum & Tamarind Cake

Cake ingredients:

2 ½ cups cake flour
½ tsp. baking soda
2 tsps. of baking powder
1 ⅔ cups unrefined sugar
¾ cup salted sweet cream butter
2 tsps. vanilla extract
2 tsps. coconut extract
1 tsp. bourbon extract
5 eggs (whites)
½ cup sour cream
2 tbsps. rumpreheat oven to 350°F (176°C)

Cake method:

1. In a large bowl mix add: ¾ cups of salted sweet cream butter, 1 ⅔ cups of unrefined sugar, 2 tsps. of vanilla extract, and 2 tsps. of coconut extract.
2. Mix the ingredients at a medium speed add in the whites of 5 large eggs, and mix until smooth.
3. Add in ½ cup of sour cream and mix until smooth.
4. In another bowl combine 2 ½ cups of cake flourwith ½ a teaspoon of baking soda and 2 teaspoons of baking powder. Sift the dry ingredients into the large bowl add 2 tablespoons of rum. Mix well.  
5. Bake in two separate 9-inch round pans for 36 minutes.

Frosting ingredients:

1 block of full-fat cream cheese
1 cup of unsalted butter
2 tsps. of vanilla extract
3 tbsp. of tamarind concentrate
1 tsp. of cardamom

Frosting method:

1. Mix cream cheese, butter, and vanilla extract until smooth.
2. Add tamarind concentrate and cardamom.
3. Blend until there are no lumps.
4. Refrigerate frosting for at least 2 hour before applying to cake.



Feature images courtesy Magnet Fréda