Eating Melbourne

Skippy Bakes is my friend Jess’s name for me, due to my penchant for baking daggy Aussie things like sponge cake and pavlova.

In honour of Australia Day, I will share with you my Ultimate Lamington Recipe.

The cake part

Easy as anything. You just bung all these ingredients in your mixing bowl and mix. It works best if you have a stand mixer with a mixing paddle (dont overbeat though – 1-2 minutes is plenty) but a wooden spoon works fine. Ideally youd make the cake the day before so its less crumbly, but eh, I never do.

1 1/2 cups SR flour (I never sift so give you permission not to)
1 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
125g melted butter

Beat all together for a couple of minutes, then throw it into a greased 20cm square cake pan. I like the Anolon loose-bottomed non stick pans as you don’t have to line them, but if you don’t have one then I’d line the pan with baking paper. Bake at 180 degrees C (160 fan forced) for 40 minutes, until the cake is golden brown on top and a skewer comes out clean. Turn out on a rack to cool completely.

While you’ve got the oven on still, cover a baking tray with shredded coconut (I’ve never measured how much, but usually use most of a 250g packet) and put it in the oven for about 5-7 minutes to toast the coconut. Keep an eye on it as it will cook pretty quickly. You want it to be a mix of white and toasty honey-coloured shreds. Take it out once it’s done and tip it into a large bowl.
(Toasted shredded coconut makes your lamingtons look a bit trendy, like Donna Hay made them instead of your nanna. You can use desiccated coconut if you like the nanna look, but then don’t toast it.)

Ok, back to the cake. Once it’s cold you can cut it up into squares. But first, do you want jam filling? If so, you can split it in half (I find this easier if I cut the cake into two halves first, and then split each half through the centre) and spread jam on one half, then sandwich it back together. You need to use enough jam so that the cake halves stick back together. And don’t be using any fancy-arse expensive jam with lots of chunky fruit in it. Cheap jam is better here.
Cut your cake up into 16 squares.

And now for the fiddly icing part

In a large metal or glass bowl, mix 320g icing sugar, 25g cocoa powder, a generous teaspoon of butter or marg, and about 1/2 cup milk. Sit it on top of a saucepan with some simmering water in the bottom, and use a whisk to get the lumps out. Add a bit more milk if you need to – you want it runny enough to thinly coat the back of a metal spoon.

Once your icing is nice and smooth, set the bowl next to your big bowl of coconut. Dip each square of cake into the icing first, then let the excess icing drip off for a couple of seconds before rolling each square in the coconut. I use two forks to dip the cake in the icing, then two spoons to roll the dipped cake in the coconut. Sit each completed lamington on your cooling rack to dry.