This recipe is so great! I tried lamingtons for the first time a few weeks ago in Australia, they’re a traditional Australian dessert. I had them on a Morning Tea break while trekking the Daintree Rainforest (our tour guide was amazing to bring these for us!), and I have been obsessed ever since. While the traditional lamingtons are vanilla sponge on the inside, I have only tasted the double-chocolate type and they were so good, I decided to try recreate those! Having never made these before, I looked for the best recipe online and decided that a recipe by Dan Lepard on the Guardian website was the way to go.

Lamingtons are big squares of sponge. Emphasis on the word big. And they are perfectly square. They are rolled in a layer of chocolate icing and dipped in dessicated coconut. While the one I had in Australia was massive, it was so light and moist you wouldn’t feel sickly full afterwards. These ones however are extremely rich. So I would suggest making them smaller (like half the size at least) than I did by using a wider baking tray, you still need them to be square in shape. Even the men struggled to finish his, and it’s a waste to throw out. My Dad suggested making mini ones as petit fours which would be nice too.

While these aren’t a Christmas recipe, they look so snowy with the lovely coconut, that I think Christmas time is the perfect time to try these. You will have extra chocolate sauce left over, which would be perfect as sauce on top of ice-cream a few days later.

 

Ingredients:

300g caster sugar
50g cocoa
75ml milk
50g unsalted butter
50g dark chocolate (O’Conaill’s & Aine’s are my favourite Irish chocolatiers)
50ml sunflower oil
4 medium eggs
100ml low-fat natural yoghurt (I used Glenisk)
3 tsp vanilla extract
175g plain flour
3 tsp baking powder

For the coating (makes 750ml)
15g cocoa
50ml cold milk
175ml boiling water
200g dark chocolate, finely chopped
450g icing sugar
1-2 250g bags coconut

Line the base of a deep, 20cm square cake tin (I suggest a wider tin for smaller pieces… these were way to big!) with nonstick paper and heat the oven to 170C. Put the sugar and cocoa in a bowl and beat in the milk. Melt the butter and chocolate in a saucepan, and add to the sugar mix along with the oil. Beat in the eggs until smooth, stir in the yoghurt and vanilla, and mix in the flour and baking powder. Pour into the tin, cover with a slightly domed sheet of foil and bake for an hour; lift off the foil for the last 15 minutes. Remove, cool in the tin and, while warm, cover with clingfilm to keep it moist.

For the coating, mix the cocoa and milk until smooth, whisk in the boiling water, then stir in the chocolate until melted. Whisk in the icing sugar until dissolved and pour into a deep, wide jug. Cut the cake into nine, dunk each piece in the coating and fish out with two forks. Roll in coconut and leave to set.