The NESSENTIALS

We wanted to do this in time for ANZAC Day but didn’t have enough ingredients. We’ve adapted this from Recipe Tin Eats.

Ingredients for 1 serving (roughly 298 calories per serving):

• Sponge:
  • 160g flour (I used Homepride self-raising, but forgot it was self-raising, so should have left out the baking powder but it all still tastes good, so who knows)
  • 10g baking powder (Dr Oetker)
  • 70g unsalted butter (Morrisons’ own)
  • 135g caster sugar (Silver Spoon)
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract (Tropical Sun – from the World Foods section at Morrisons)
  • 2 medium eggs (Morrisons’ own)
  • 85ml milk (semi-skimmed, Morrisons’ own)
• Icing:
  • 300g icing sugar (Tate & Lyle)
  • 30g cocoa powder (Morrisons’ own)
  • 10g unsalted butter (Morrisons’ own)
  • 100ml boiling water
• Coating:
  • 180g desiccated coconut

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 160C on the fan setting.
• Add the flour and baking powder together in a small/medium bowl.
• Line a 20cm × 20cm baking tin with parchment paper, leaving an overhang on all sides (to make it easy to remove).
• Beat butter, sugar and vanilla in a bigger bowl with an electric mixer (I used the 1 setting, your mileage may vary) until light and fluffy.
• Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition so the batter is smooth, not curdled. Ours was a bit lumpy though.
• Add half the flour mix and gently fold to combine, then stir in all the milk, and fold in the rest of the flour mix.
• Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 25 minutes until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
• Stand for 5 minutes then use the overhang baking paper to lift the cake out onto a wire rack and cool completely. We chucked it in the fridge overnight. When we were ready to continue in the morning we cut the cake into 16 squares and chucked them in the freezer for 1 hour.
• Combine the icing ingredients in a heat-proof bowl and mix until smooth. This can be a challenge – ours was lumpy again – but that doesn’t seem to be an obstacle really.
• Place the desiccated coconut in a shallow bowl.
• Place a piece of cake in the icing and roll to coat using 2 forks. Transfer it into the coconut and quickly roll to coat all over in coconut. Transfer to a surface to dry.
• Repeat with remaining sponges. 
• Stand for 1 to 2 hours, or until set.

Recommendations:

• Don’t cut your cake until you need to freeze it, because otherwise the edges dry out and make the cake squares stale.
• Don’t start on the icing until you have about 5 minutes left on your 1 hour of freezer time. Otherwise your icing sugar sets at the top and you have to crack it and mix it through and follow the other advice Nagi gives in her recipe (so yes, read that too).
• Don’t pour all of the desiccated coconut you have into your rolling bowl at once – put in a little and top it off when you’re running low to avoid waste.
• We encourage you to clean your fork however you wish once you’ve transferred your cake cube from the chocolate icing to the coconut bath. Otherwise your coconut becomes too contaminated with chocolate icing, and won’t stick as well. How to do that, we wonder…
• Yes, you may have icing and coconut left over from the amounts given. You just need a bit more for the whole rolling and coating aspect, because you want to ensure optimal coverage. So there will be waste after all, but not too much.

I last made lamingtons when I was 6 – do you have a mythical recipe that you’ve wanted to attempt again and what is it? Or do you have a typical national bake that you want to try?