Chocolate coconut cake

Hello everyone,

I hope you all had a great week. I was out every night last week, including two evenings at the Night Noodle Markets which are on as part of Good Food Month, so I didn’t do any cooking at all! But I did promise you that great chocolate cake recipe so here it is. I made it a couple of weeks ago and it was a hit. It is so easy, as you will see when you read the recipe, that I think I will be whipping up this one fairly regularly. It comes from a book I absolutely love, called Epicure Chocolate. If you like cooking, or if you know someone who does, you should definitely snap up this book if you see it. It is quite difficult to get so I now buy a copy whenever I do see it to give to friends. I have cooked heaps of things from it and every one has been a winner. I’m sure you are going to love this cake.

Have a good week!

Love from Jane x

Chocolate coconut cake

(from Epicure Chocolate, edited by Kylie Walker)

What you need:
· 250g butter, melted
· ½ cup Dutch cocoa powder
· 1 1/3 cups castor sugar
· 3 eggs
· 1 ½ cups desiccated coconut
· 1 ½ cups self raising flour
· ¾ cup milk

What you do:
1. Preheat oven to 180C.
2. Place all the ingredients into a bowl and mix well until smooth. You can mix by hand, you don’t need to use beaters. Don’t panic when you add the milk and the mix seems too runny, as you stir the ingredients together it will be alright.
3. Pour the mixture into a lined 24cm round cake tin and bake for 50 minutes or until cooked through. I must have a really, really slow oven because I ended up cooking it for probably another 30 minutes on top of this – so keep testing it and keep baking till you are sure it is cooked through. (It will be lovely and moist from the coconut).
4. Cool on a wire rack.
5. To serve the cake you can spread it with chocolate icing, serve it with thick cream and a dusting of cocoa powder, or even serve it with lovely thick Greek yoghurt and raspberries.