Coconut Date Pudding Cake - The Recipe Rebel (2024)

Last updated on May 25, 2020

This Coconut Date Pudding Cake has an incredibly moist date cake layer topped with caramelized coconut topping — be sure to serve it with a scoop of ice cream!

So I was asked to bring a dessert to my in-laws for Thanksgiving.

That’s pretty normal, except for the one time my mother-in-law accidentally asked me to bring a salad. I was a little confused, but I wasn’t going to ask her what she was thinking, so I made a salad. I’m sure I used a recipe and everything.

She’s never asked me to bring another salad.

Not that it was a bad salad, but I think when she said “salad” she meant “dessert”, and she’s never made the same mistake again.

So my husband asked me what I was thinking of bringing, some new idea I was going to try out?

I said, “No, something I’ve made before –“

“What?! You don’t make things twice.”

“Actually, I’ve made this recipe two times, but not for quite a while. You probably won’t even remember it. It’s a date coconut cake, I know it sounds kind of lame –“

“No! It doesn’t sound lame. I remember that cake! It’s like all warm, and gooey….”

“Yeah! It’s more like a pudding-y cake, and we ate it with ice cream..”

For real. These are the things we talk about.

Cake.

I didn’t even make up that conversation just to have something somewhat interesting to say to you before I hand over the recipe. I wish you could have seen his eyes light up when I told him what I was going to make.

We both get pretty excited about our dessert.

And just food in general.

If you’ve never baked with dates before, there’s no reason to be afraid or weirded out. The dates don’t have a really strong flavour, they add such incredible moisture and a mild, fruity flavour to the cake. Just make sure you pick up pitted dates, and all you have to do is chop them up and soften them in some water. They will be pretty dense and chewy before you soak them — that is nothing to worry about!

The cake is so rich and moist, and then it’s topped with a coconut and brown sugar topping that is out of this world. Can you even believe this is light? You could eat it plain, and it would be totally amazing.

Me? Mine looks a little more like this.

But it’s less than 300 calories a piece, so I can top it with whatever I want, right??

*This post was originally written in November 2014 and the photos and recipe have been updated. My apologies for all that stuff about my life 😉