Saturday, May 5, 2012

Cake for dessert

When invited to Lauren and Tom's for dinner one night this week, I made my usual offer to bring a dessert. I'm running a bit short on easily transportable desserts and puddings, though, so I decided to make a golden  lemon coconut cake (p72) instead.


I needed time to make the cake after work, so I made a lunchtime visit to the supermarket for the ingredients  - specifically a box of Edmonds butter cake mix, as this is another recipe from the 'baking with Edmonds' chapter.


When I got home from work, I immediately pulled out the mixer and got to work - not that there's much work involved when you're using a cake mix! I put the packet contents in the mixer bowl with butter, water and eggs. The coconut is to be folded through after the mixing, but I missed that bit and threw it in anyway. When I realised what I'd done, I scooped out as much as I could, but there was still a lot of coconut in the initial mix.


While the mix was beating, I prepared my cake tin. Normally I am careful to use the exact tin specified in the recipe, but I'd pictured this as a round cake - when I realised the recipe specified a rectangular lamington tin, it didn't seem like the result would be suitable for taking as a dessert. I decided to be naughty and used a 20cm round tin instead.


I folded the salvaged coconut through the beaten cake mixture, and poured it into the prepared tin. I set a timer so I could check the cake after 30 minutes (the given cooking time is 35-40 minutes, but it pays to be wary, especially when you're not using the specified tin).


The cooking time ended up being about 35 minutes in total. While the cake cooled, I made up the icing - a mixture of icing sugar, lemon juice and butter, beaten until creamy. After icing the cake, I piled lemon zest on top and headed to Lauren and Tom's.


I would have expected the use of a smaller tin to make for a higher cake, yet it was still fairly squat. I think if you made it in the lamington tin, it would be more like a slice than a cake. I can't vouch for that, but I can say that as a cake, it's quite successful: a nice fluffy, coconutty cake with a zing from the creamy lemon icing. Not  bad, if I do say so myself.

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