Hi all,
This week I’m going to take you through a coconut lemon cake. It’s basically a Victoria sponge cake with finely desiccated coconut replacing some of the flour, so very easy to make and decorate and it also tastes great!
First you will need to get finely desiccated coconut. You will find this in most Asian food stores or you can get our standard desiccated coconut form the supermarket and blend it to make it finer. I would recommend using the stuff from the Asian food stores as it is just handier and you can get quite a lot of it for reasonable price (small bags for €1.20 and 2kg bags for €8.45 last time I checked).
Ingredients
8oz butter or margarine, softened at room temperature
8oz caster sugar
4 medium eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
6oz self raising flour
4oz desiccated coconut
Lemon curd for the filling. You can buy a jar or see Lemon Curd recipes on my blog. I can say right now that homemade is far nicer that any you will buy.
7 Minute Icing to cover the cake
Method
For the Cake:
Line 2 8” cake tins with baking paper. Preheat the oven at 180 degrees Celsius.
Whisk the butter and sugar in a bowl until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and continue to whisk. Add the vanilla extract, while whisking. Now sieve in the flour and desiccated coconut. If you are using a very fine sieve you may have to sieve in the flour then add the coconut. If you have a sieve with larger holes you can mix the coconut with the flour and then sieve it in. Add about a third or fourth of the flour and coconut, whisk, then repeat again until all flour and coconut is added.
Once all ingredients are incorporated divide it between your baking tins and place in the oven for 20-25 minutes. When cooked they should be golden brown and springy when pressed and a skewer should come out clean when passed through the middle.
To be honest these cakes always smell very eggy to me rather than coco-nutty, but that fades when they cool down. So if they smell a bit strange straight out of the oven it’s normal, a bit weird, but normal.
Remove from the cake tins and leave on a wire rack to cool. Not these cakes are very easy to handle when cooked.
As the cake is a bit dry until you add the lemon curd anyway there is very little difference between using normal flour and making a gluten free version.
For the 7 minute Icing
This recipe is from Paula Deen, I haven’t found one that works with the coconut mixed in yet so like to try variations of the recipe. If you have one that works for you by all means use that.
Ingredients
1/3 cup water
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 1/2 cup sugar
2 large egg whites
1 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
(I dont have an actual cup measure and usualy just use a small teacup)
Method
Place all ingredients in a heat proof bowl and beat with an electric whisk for 1 minute. Place bowl over a pot of boiling water (bain-marie) and whisk on high with an electric whisk for another 6 minutes.
As I have said this doesn’t work too well with coconut as it loses its smooth glossy appearance, but usually I try to mix some of the desiccated coconut through the 7 minute icing before covering the cake with it. I’ve had varying results, but if you are using the cake fairly soon and have a lot of icing try it.
To put the cake together, place one of the sponges on your serving dish, poke holes in it and then put a generous layer of lemon curd over it. Place second sponge on top and repeat. Dollop the 7 minute icing on top of the cake and spread it with a knife, being very generous with the icing.
I usually start with the edges of the cake rather than the centre as the lemon curd on top causes it to slip off a bit which makes spreading it a bit awkward.
You can garnish the cake with a string of lemon peel in the centre if you wish. If you did not add coconut to your icing then it is a bit more malleable and you can place the round part of a spoon flat on the icing and pull it away to make spikes on the cake.
It is best served a few hours to a day after putting together to allow the icing and the curd to moisten the cake.
Happy baking!
The Mixing Bowl 