Australia – Lamingtons

If you’re familiar with our “Around the World in 12 Dishes” series, then you’ve probably noticed that we have a bunch of sweetteeth in our family and more than once we actually had the dessert recipe picked out way before figuring out the main dish, go figure… For Australia it was the same deal, when we researched I stumbled over a website called AllDownUnder.com and a couple of typically Australian recipes, one of which was Lamingtons. First reaction was – what the heck is a Lamington and once we looked through the recipe we came to the conclusion that this is something we just had to do!

We then found another version of this recipe, which looked quite a bit easier, on Lessons Learnt Journal.

So to start things off, here’s the recipe:

Since Valerie has a few issues with coconut related things of late (they make her feel dry), we tried to see, if we could find an alternative to the desiccated coconut and came up with crushed peanuts, which we used our little electric chopper for, which Nico of course loved to use, the first batch almost started to turn into peanut butter, because Mr. Button-presser got a little trigger-happy. Another thing I HAVE to mention is that Australian sponge cake seems to be the same as North American pound cake and NOT the sponge cake you can get here in Canada or the US, because it is far more dense (and trust me, you need the density, otherwise you’ll end up with plenty of cake pieces stuck in your icing).

Also our lack of a microwaveable bowl that would be big enough for the mix led to us going down the less easy route and doing it stove-top, which comes to the same, it’ll just take a little longer to get the mix to the right consistency. For some reason our mix got a little thicker than anticipated, so that after having a few cubes fall apart in the mix we poured/drizzled the icing over the pieces, then let them drip off a little, roll them in the peanuts and set apart to set. We also did a few with just chocolate for Nico, some with cinnamon sprinkled on top of the chocolate (yummy!) and two with non-pareils, which did not stick too well, though.

So while it turned out to be quite time-consuming, Nico had exactly one corner of one square and said he liked it, overall the whole thing turned out to be quite on the very sweet side, I enjoyed them and I can definitely see kids having a blast dipping the cubes into the icing mix and then rolling them in the coconut (or whatever other mix)!

Please check out our partner blogs and their Australia ideas: Adventures In Mommydom, Creative Family Fun, Domestic Goddesque, Glittering Muffins, Juggling with Kids, Kitchen Counter Chronicles, Mermaids’ Makings, Mom 2 Posh Little Divas, Montessori Tidbits, Mummymummymum, The Educators’ Spin On It and The Usual Mayhem!

If you do this, we’d LOVE to see a photo of it. Email it to us or post it on our Facebook page. We’d love to do a Facebook album, a Pinterest board and a page of your creations

Please link up your Australia dish and/or craft in our linky below, we would love to see it!

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