Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories - Day 2

Special Christmas food is the topic for the second day of Geneabloggers Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories.  This is a difficult topic for me, since my mother and grandmother prepared so many many wonderful, southern holiday foods.  But I suppose my all-time favorite would be the delicious coconut cake that my mother made, a fluffy white confection, filled and iced with seven-minute frosting and freshly grated coconut.  Even as a young child, I was aware of how much effort it took to make that cake.  When I was growing up, my mother did not own a power mixer of any kind - she beat the egg whites with the old-fashioned hand-cranked mixer and added the moist, white coconut that she had grated by hand - hard to imagine for most contemporary cooks. Standing tall on its crystal cake stand, my mother's masterpiece towered over the other Christmas desserts, beckoning young and old to taste it.