Erin Mann is baking a new cake every week for a year from the "All Cakes Considered" cookbook and shares her adventures here on AnnArbor.com. Read past columns here.

All hail the “Butter Queen of Southern Cuisine!” Paula Deen is back this week with a cake that has a name as long as its list of ingredients. I’d heard about Grandgirl’s Fresh Apple Cake from Georgia long before encountering it in “All Cakes Considered.” It sounded spectacular; the apple cake to trump all apple cakes. Would it live up to the hype?

After last week’s disappointment - an underdone and oily cake, the only place to go was up. With flavorful mix-ins like coconut and pecans I was liking the sound of Grandgirl's cake already. Oh, and did I mention there's a buttery buttermilk sauce?

The cake is so simple to mix; I put everything in the bowl at the same time! I dumped the wet ingredients in with the dry ingredients and beat on medium speed until combined. Then I folded in the apples, pecans and coconut. I love the big, flaky, unsweetened coconut they sell at By The Pound.

“All Cakes Considered” advises baking this cake in a tube pan with straight sides. Fellow bakers, take heed and save the pretty Bundt pan for another day! This cake, with all its fruit, nuts and sauce is not the most structurally sound and will stick to all the little nooks and crannies in a fancy pan. I used my 2 Piece Angel Food Pan.

While the cake was still hot in the pan, I poked about 20 holes in the top of the cake with the “non-business end” of a wooden spoon. I made the sauce in a small pot on the stovetop and transferred it to a small heatproof bowl with a handle and spout to make pouring it over the cake easier. You want the sauce going in the cake, not on it. It will taste worlds better all soaked in and will be less messy!

Once all the little ditches were filled with sticky, gooey, buttery sauce I continued cooling the cake for an hour.

When I tried to unmold the cake from the pan a good bit of it stuck to the insert of my 2-piece pan. There was about 1/3 of the cake stuck inside the pan and remaining 2/3 made its way on the plate. In the words of Winnie the Pooh, "Oh bother."

I confess, I skipped an important step during the pan preparation. I usually cut a ring of parchment paper to fit in the bottom of my 2-piece pan. I think the cake got stuck in the grooves where the two pieces meet. I thought a liberal coat of baking spray would do the trick but, boy, was I wrong!

The appearance of Grandgirl's cake left something to be desired but the flavor was excellent. I'm nuts about coconut so I really loved the addition of the chewy flakes with apples and nuts.

I managed to cut 4 good slices from the cake so I could take a photo and give some away, but the rest was eaten in clumps rather than slices. It was a delicious dessert crumbled in a bowl with some vanilla ice cream. The Grandgirl's cake recipe is available at Food Network's website.

Erin Mann is ruining diets one cake at a time and welcomes your baking wisdom. E-mail her at SheGotTheBeat@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter. Facebook users can also keep up-to-date with A CAKE A WEEK by joining the group.