Call Me Cherry Jelly, ‘Cause I’m On The Lam(ington)!

So I came across the idea for these from one of the random cooking / baking shows that I’m obsessed with (do I remember which one? Of course not 🙁 I have a sneaking suspicion that it was from the couple of episodes of “The Great Australian Bake Off” that I watched after my sadness over having already watched all seven seasons of “The Great British Bake Off”. The Australian one was terrible FYI. Although they made me want to make these, so not a total loss 🙂 ).

Lamingtons are a delicious desserty delicacy of Australian origin that just looked too amazing for me to resist. I mean ‘cmon! Vanilla cake? Yes please! Chocolate? Bring it on! Shredded coconut coating? (which not only tastes delicious, but also allows you to embrace your inner lazybones when dipping these cakes in chocolate since the coconut will cover all manner of sins and messiness) Where do I sign up??!!! (also, sorry, not sorry for that insanely long run on sentence 😉 )

So the actual “traditional” version of these is literally just squares of sponge cake dipped in chocolate and coated in coconut. Now although that sounds delicious all on its own, I think adding a soupçon (read a lot 🙂 ) of additional flavour to these would not go awry in my book. I’m definitely not the genius that came up with this or anything, you can find many a recipe online where these are sandwiched together with a layer of (typically raspberry) jam before the whole “coated in chocolate and coconut” situation happens. Even that though was still not enough of an amp up for me (maybe because I felt like too many people had already done that, and my competitive nature insisted that I best these folks – yes, I just used the word “folks”…deal with it – with something even more outrageous! ….yes, you are so so outrageous Amber. Filling mini cakes with cherry buttercream and jam???!!! You crazy, think-outside-the-box rebel you 😉 I’m sure Mensa will be contacting you any moment now to award you their highest honour of brilliance 😉 ).

The cake did end up baking up thicker than I thought it would, so the resulting cake “bites” are not exactly one literal bite (although if you are a whale, elephant, or other extra large mammal, then “bite” is still a totally justifiable descriptor, so I’m sticking with it 😉 . Another possibility is that you could just get your jaw dislocated (I recommend going to your local biker bar and hitting on the head guys’ girlfriend…Voilà! Instant dislocated jaw!), then “bite-sized” could possibly also work as a human description 😉 .

If you choose to make this and actually want them to be a bit(e) smaller ( 😉 ), you can always bake the cake in a larger pan (possibly 9×13 would work well – just remember that you likely need less baking time though, so keep a closer eye on it if you decide to adopt this method). Alternatively, you can slice your cake in 3 layers, and reserve the top layer for some other use (may I humbly suggest covering it in some sort of salted caramel vegan ice cream and consuming on the spot? Yes I may).

Another thing I thought about doing to change these was toasting the coconut, which I frankly think would add a nice additional slightly crunchy outer texture and amp up the coconut flavour on the outside. However, I figured for a first attempt I should at least have them look like traditional Lamingtons from the outside otherwise anyone stumbling across this blog will harass me for having a pun title for this post that is blatant false advertising. Possible court dates and tears would follow, and “ain’t nobody got time for that!” (normally I would’ve just put the original version link for this, but I actually kind of love the autotune version, but if you have a hate on for all things dance-able, fun, and just plain upbeat, I suppose you could just watch this instead.)