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No one who sampled the cake complained. But it wasn't exactly what I had in mind, and the drippy frosting, which looked as if it belonged on a vampire wedding cake, disappointed me, once I sobered up.

Last weekend, the coconut-cake spirit seized me again. I found a recipe in a little book called "Cakewalk," and girded myself to attempt it, although it required a glaze and a frosting that suspiciously resembled the dreaded Seven-Minute Icing.

The cakes -- the easy part -- were in the oven as my husband flipped through Karen Barker's cookbook, "Sweet Stuff." With his methodical personality, he has become the baker in my house, and he was checking ingredients for a devil's food cake he planned to make for guests the following weekend.

"Hey, she says Shirley Corriher's book has a recipe for the world's best coconut cake," he said.

I slapped my head with a floured hand. Why didn't I think of "CookWise" in the first place? It has come to my aid so many times. And it did have the world's easiest coconut frosting: sour cream, coconut, sugar and vanilla, mixed together and chilled for 30 minutes. The cake was a little different from what I'd already made. I had used coconut milk instead of buttermilk, but I figured that couldn't hurt.

The frosting went in between the layers, not on the sides (yay!). After assembling the layers and frosting them, I refrigerated the cake overnight, as the book advised.

This was The Cake. It may not have been my grandmother's cake -- maybe nothing ever will be -- but it was moist, coconutty and sweet but not too sweet, thanks to the tang of the sour cream. Best of all, I could make it without taking a week off and requiring a vacation at a luxury spa afterward.

And there was still a little improvisation involved, since I had used the cake from one recipe and the frosting from another. So, ha, ha, baking gods. I can have my cake, and tweak it, too.

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