Skep’s Place | The Coconut Cake

Skep Succumbs to Peer Pressure from People on the Internet and Eats a Pepperidge Farm Frozen Coconut Layer Cake

It’s a working title. ⁠⁠⁠⁠—Skep

My recent entry of Tiger Tracks seems to have caused a minor stir in the comments regarding coconut cake:

A series of online comments. oopsiedoodle says “I don’t know who cut the cake but I’m here to say that coconut cake is delicious and that fact cannot possible be considered offbeat”. skep says “If not for this comic I’m not sure I would know that coconut cake was a thing that existed”. miela583 says “I know this wasn’t the point of the essay, but do they not sell peppridge farm frozen coconut cakes in your area? The thought haunted me even after closing Neocities.” oopsiedoodle replies, “That’s exactly the cake I was thinking of. Admittedly it’s not representative of all coconut cakes, but I remember loving it as a kid. I haven’t had one in years though”. p7uen adds “I’m all for coconut cake but com on this is a party not a coffee morning!” — I love this community.

This was my introduction to Pepperidge Farm’s Frozen Coconut Layer Cake. By the way these folks talk about it, this cake is a dessert staple that, despite being born and raised in these United States, I have managed to overlook my entire life. Should I assume it has the same cultural clout as the Milano cookie, another Pepperidge Farm offering that everybody recognizes?

(This essay is not a paid advertisement for Pepperidge Farm. But reach out to me with five or six figures and we could fix that.)

Thus, after poking around the grocery store’s frozen dessert section—an area that I purposefully avoid with the same intentionality as I did with the Barbie aisle at the toy store when I was a kid, except replace the cooties with diabetes—I found that it does, in fact, carry this cake. Well, there goes my only possible excuse right out the window. Guess I have to try this thing.

First off, I gotta say: you can buy this sucker for less than $6 (as of this writing in February 2026)(I have to be specific with timing because it’s safest to assume the economy is going to bottom out any day now). I’ve paid more money for jars of spaghetti sauce. It’s not a particularly large cake; they suggest 8 servings, which was probably accurate back when it was first released and American serving sizes were still, you know, reasonable. But it’s also somehow less expensive than a package of Milano cookies. I’ll let you figure out the math on that, because I sure can’t.

Skep holding the box of cake in one hand; the box measures maybe 8 inches to a side. The box is labeled “Pepperidge Farm Classic Coconut Layer Cake” with a blurb in the corner that reads “Coconut lovers unite! serves 8”. The image on the box shows a slice of cake, with three layers of yellow sponge and white icing topped with shavings of coconut. — You know this isn’t a real cake because real cakes require two hands.

I also took pictures of the unboxing, to fully document the experience:

The side of the box is opened to view the cake within. It sits exposed with only a thin styrofoam tray for protection. One corner of the cake appears to be missing icing. — Huh, I would have thought it’d at least be wrapped in plastic or something.

The cake is now removed from the box and sits on the stove. It is a square cake, covered in icing and coconut shavings as the box depicts, though in a more underwhelming way. The left side of the cake seems to be sagging. — I’d probably be droopy too if I was a mass-produced dessert item.

Not exactly what I would call “exciting”, but this is a sub-$6 dessert that can serve 4-8 people, so expectations should be adjusted accordingly. Anyway, there’s not really a whole lot one can say about a shaggy-looking white square, so I guess there’s nothing else to do but cut this thing open already.

I appreciate the box providing the helpful suggestion to rinse the knife with warm water between slices, because I’m too dim-witted to think of something like that myself and it really did make cutting this frozen cake into nice, even portions a breeze. It also recommends letting slices sit at room temperature for 20 minutes before eating; which, again, a very useful tip, but it also means I can’t eat cake until nearly half an hour after I decide I want to eat cake, which is an agonizing challenge for anybody raised in a society accustomed to instant gratification. Especially when you have an incessantly-demanding sweet tooth. Yet I persevered, if only for the sake of retaining my journalistic integrity.

A triangular slice of real three-layer cake with icing and coconut shavings, resting in the center of a blue plate next to a fork; a glass of some brownish booze sits in the background. — Approximate size: one doorstop.

I started my cake-consuming process by taking a bite of the sponge by itself, without any icing. This methodology isn’t typical for me—I can eat cake like a normal-ass person, promise—but I wanted to confirm a suspicion I had that, despite a whole five or ten minutes of research, I could not get the internet to either verify or reject. See, I needed to taste the sponge on its own as the very first step of my experiment, before muddying my taste buds with any flavor of coconut, to answer my one burning question: is the cake itself coconut? Or just the frosting?

My friends… this is not a coconut cake. This is a yellow cake with coconut icing.

Pepperidge farm is wholesale lying to us about the flavor of this cake! And lest you think I’m being pedantic over here—“but Skep, if the end result tastes like coconut, then isn’t that enough?”—consider: if you put chocolate frosting on a yellow cake, you don’t call that a chocolate cake, do you? Hell, red velvet and carrot cakes are traditionally served with cream cheese icing, but they’re still named entirely after the contents of the cake! So, yes, while I will concede that at least the icing itself has coconut flavor that isn’t borne solely from the smattering of flakes on top, if the sponge does not contain coconut, then calling this cake “coconut” is false advertising. Pepperidge Farm will be hearing from my legal team.

(Again, hit me up if you’re still interested in that sponsorship deal!)

That objection aside, the cake is pretty good. I’m fairly coconut-neutral, so in spite of my fundamental issues with the name of the product, I think I actually prefer the plain yellow cake. It balances out the icing’s coconut flavor, which remains present without declaring itself the sole focus like you’d get from something like a Mounds/Almond Joy. Actually, I’d go so far as to say this cake would be entirely forgettable without that coconut. Considering that Pepperidge Farm has been selling this frozen cake since the 70s, I’d say “forgettable” clearly isn’t a term that applies to it.

And uh, yeah, I guess that’s my review. Like I said, it’s a cheap freezer-aisle cake, but it’s not bad for what it is. I wouldn’t get one if I was trying to impress somebody, but if I didn’t have time to make a dessert for family or friends or something, this could do perfectly fine in a pinch (so long as nobody had any serious objections to coconut). I don’t think I can sit here and say, damn, I can’t believe I’ve been missing out all this time. But I can understand why a 6-year-old might pick it for their birthday.

Still though, for a party, just go with chocolate or vanilla.