Chocolate and Lamingtons

For our wedding anniversary this year, I wanted to make a chocolate cake as chocolate is Hubby's all-time-favourite flavour. He would have been equally satisfied with a plain old boring chocolate cake, but I wanted to try making a cake complete with cream fillings, icing and decorations. Like those sold in the cake shops. I've never ever done this before, so I made sure I compared a few recipes, read up exactly how to cream the icing and got the right ingredients.

I finally chose a chocolate sponge recipe from Happy Home Baker's as it didn't use as much sugar and butter as the others. However, it did require the use of 4 eggs. At least they're nutritious.

Alas, instead of our anniversary cake, the chocolate sponge cake turned into Lamingtons instead.


Well, here's the full story. I'd started making the cake yesterday as I wanted to allow time for myself today to focus on cooking lunch and frosting the cake. KK was home from school and in trying to involve him in the occasion and letting him have some fun, I asked if he would like to help me. He replied enthusiastically.

Here's my biggest mistake. I allowed him to crack open an egg. I had already cracked 3 eggs into the mixing bowl and for the fouth one, I knocked it a little and asked him to simply pull it apart. From the way the boy held the egg, I should have guessed a disaster was coming. It did cross my mind, what if he screwed up? I thought the worst that could happen is he dropped the whole egg into the bowl, I'll just pick up the shells. But it was worst than that. His clumsy fingers applied so much strength to the egg that he literally burst it! A huge amount of yolk and white splashed and landed OUTSIDE the bowl and even on his sleeves. Gosh, how am I gonna salvage the situation now? The kid still had the cheek to laugh, until I scolded him. But I know, it's all my fault. So much for cooking with kids. I often read about the fun parents have baking with their kids, I wonder if it is really true. To me, it was really 越帮越忙.

Hubby thinks it's alright to just add in one more egg since quite a lot spilled out. I don't know, but what can I do? I don't want to start again and waste the 3 eggs. So my cake had about 4.5 eggs, and they're extra large eggs somemore.

I'm not sure if the eggs had an impact or was it the way I folded in the flour that caused my cake to fail. I could see that after I mixed in the chocolate flour, the batter suddenly became quite little. I was expecting a big cake since the egg mix was pretty volumous. Also, I had forgotten to preheat the oven earlier, so the batter was like waiting for about 10 mins for the oven to be ready, and I thought it shrank even more as it sat there. The cake did not rise much in the oven but the aroma was fantastic.

KK kept asking if it's ready so I actually stopped the baking about 5 mins earlier than the required time, when the skewer turns out clean. I'm not sure if I'd let it complete the timer, would it make any difference. Another lesson for bakers - never be forced by hungry children to short-cut the baking time.

As you can see from the picture above, the bottom part of the cake is not rised properly. It was such a flat cake that there is no way I can slice it into 3 parts to put in the fillings... :(

The taste is not bad though. The man and boys in the family loved it. I trimmed the corners of the cake to make it square and they gobbled it up.

I decided to bake another cake for our anniversary and transform this sponge into Lamingtons. Lamingtons is a traditional Australian cake, usually a sponge cake, in the shape of a cube, coated in a layer of traditionally chocolate icing then desiccated coconut. Lamingtons are most likely named after Charles Cochrane-Baillie, 2nd Baron Lamington, who served as Governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901. I first learnt about this from KK, who said he ate some in school. Personally, I'd never eaten nor seen Lamingtons before, though it shouldn't be hard to find them.

It's easy to make them, using leftover chocolate icing for the 'real' anniversary cake and ready made dessicated coconut. Just cut them into cube, poke with a fork and dip or spread the chocolate icing over it and then dip or sprinkle the coconut over it. It turned out quite nice, like snow flakes on the cake and the combination of coconut and sweet chocolate icing actually makes my hard cake taste better.

I made another version when I ran out of chocolate icing. This time, I coated the cake with strawberry jam and then coconut. Also not bad and not as sweet as the chocolate icing. To differentiate the two, I used red paper cups for the strawberry version.