Re-Inventing the Lamington 2014 Day One: Clotted Cream Lamingtons

 

I'm just going to give it to you how you want it with the lamingtons this year: full throttle, fast and nasty. It's Valentine's Day after all - let's treat ourselves.

I got the idea for these lams from a Twitter conversation I had with Dom and the good people at Rodda's, who make the clotted cream that everybody dreams of pretty much every night of their lives.Well, be honest with yourselves - I know what you think about when nobody's watching.

Even when I was younger and thought I didn't like cream (I've been wrong about a lot of things in life, especially things I've thought I wouldn't like... but most of those aren't blog suitable topics), clotted cream always had me salivating. It's rich, smooth and fatty to the point that it seems light and dreamy. But then, pretty much 100% of the time, I think that full fat dairy products taste as though they're low fat even when they aren't. It's one of the food world's great magic tricks.

These lamingtons draw on everything I have learnt from three years of re-inventing. They're chiffon cake, which is flavoursome and soft, even straight from the fridge; they are coated in real milk chocolate, which gives a crisp carapace, the perfect counterpart to their fluffy interior; they are filled, and gorgeously so. I think they might just be perfect, a lamington that the 2nd Baron Lamington really would be proud of. Well, I wouldn't let him call them 'bloody, poofy, woolly biscuits', that's for sure.

That's a 'bloody, puffy, woolly' moustache you have there, Baron Lamington.

Remember that you still have time to Re-Invent the Lamington yourself, and win a beautiful prize. Get to it.

Clotted Cream Lamingtons

You will need:

1 x batch Coconut and Vanilla Bean Chiffon Cake

300g milk chocolate (or plain if you prefer)
1 pot of clotted cream
100g dessicated coconut

1. To make slicing the cake into lamingtons easier, I wrap it in cling film and freeze overnight. Cut the frozen cake into eight rectangles. You can eat the trimmings later.
2. Melt the chocolate either over warm water or in the microwave. Set the coconut in a dish.
3. Now you have a choice: you can either slice each piece of cake through the middle and sandwich with clotted cream before dipping in chocolate and coconut, which is tricky to do neatly but keeps the filling as a nice surprise, or you can dip the cake cubes first into the chocolate, then roll in coconut and slice them when the chocolate has set, before putting them together again with clotted cream. My preference is for the second method, as it gives the lamingtons more of a dessert feel. But I am giving you the freedom of choice.