One of the pleasures I’ve when I am not commuting is the joy of making something in the kitchen. There’s nothing like creating a wonderful meal, or attempting some new formula and the result is a tangible, delicious dish that’s so dissimilar to software.

This weekend I came across some time to whip up a batch of lamingtons. These were destined for our Pot Luck Lunch time” tomorrow where many people are going to bring something indigenous” from their house country.

I had planned on building Pavlova, but my colleague from New Zealand said they’re apparently a kiwi-dish, and she had already planned to create it. Oh well.

The hard thing about making Lamingtons is that it’s a little labourious to make. I decided on acquiring the shortcut and buying a prepared sponge wedding cake, but imagine my surprise (and joint disappointment about even more work ahead) when I found that none from the supermarkets near me sold plain old sponge cake. Yes, you can get an ordinary madeira cake, or even a Jamaican” fruit cake, or any of the final ready birthday” cakes all protected in icing and cream. Nope towards the plain old sponge cake. Oh well.

I used the next formula for the sponge wedding cake after searching and hot cross bun hamper deciding I actually didn’t want a particularly eggy-tasty sponge cake.

Making it was pretty self-explanatory. Cream the butter and glucose, and slowly add the eggs one at a time. Blend in the vanilla and collapse in the first cup of flour before folding in the next cup of flour and milk. Pour into a sponge cake (I used a long tray) and bake within a pre-heated 180oC range until prepared through. If you are using a square tin, it’s said to be 30 minutes, but I used a thinner tray so it got less than 20 in a lover forced oven.

Another part to Lamingtons are preparing the icing as well as the coconut. I used this formula , but have to admit it turned out a little bit too rich.

This is pretty easy. Basically mix it all together on a bain-marie (i.e. bowl over boiling water) until it all melts. I found this icing much too thick, therefore i finished up watering it down with far more milk.

Right now came the terribly messy component.

First, I slice the sponge in half and then spread some strawberry jam between each item. My initial few efforts to coating them ended up being rather devastating with cake crumbs, delicious chocolate and coconut almost everywhere. A little bit of looking on the web and people recommended putting the cake in the fridge. Apparently departing the cake immediately could have also helped make it easier to cope with. Five or 10 minutes into the fridge and the items were much easier to handle.

Using two forks, I dipped the sponge sandwiches into the chocolate sauce. I held them up allowing the extreme drip off, before dunking them into a bowl of desiccated coconut. Using two spoons to press the coconut into the icing, I came across that was a bit cleaner than using my hands (as recommended by many recipes). I let them dry out a bit on a rack before putting them into an airtight box for storage.

Messy, pleasant but probably not something I’d try all the time.

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