coconut flour

17th March – It’s another clothes swap with the book club tonight so I am making cakes to take along as my contribution. I have made a ginger cake, a firm favourite, and I was thinking about what else I could make that is a bit different. I have some coconut flour in the cupboard and I was thinking about how good coconut and cardamom work together in a curry. It seemed to me that it might work in cake. The scent of cardamom as this cake is baking is phenomenal, it promises to be a great cake.

18th March- The cake was a big success. I found the cardamom a little overpowering and might reduce the number of seeds used next time, but I was outvoted on this point by my friends. They all sang the cake’s praises. They might have been being kind to me of course, but they assured me they weren’t.

I iced the cake before I took it along to the clothes swap. I mixed icing sugar with the juice of a lime and a couple of tablespoonfuls of desiccated coconut, until I got a fairly stiff icing. The lime was a good call, emphasising the citrus notes of the cardamom, but if you don’t have a lime in the house using lemon juice or water would work equally well.

175g butter, soft
175g caster sugar
3 eggs
100g greek yoghurt
25g coconut flour
125g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
15-20 green cardamom pods, shelled and the seeds crushed finely in a pestle and mortar (this makes a very scant teaspoon of ground cardamom)

Method
Cream the butter and sugar together until fluffy and light. Add one egg at a time, beating well between each addition. Fold in the yoghurt and then the coconut flour, plain flour, baking powder and cardamom.

Once combined, spoon the batter into an 18cm cake tin that has been lined with parchment. Bake in a preheated oven at 180°c, gas mark 4 or the centre of the Aga’s baking oven for 35-45 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool for ten minutes in the tin, before turning out and leaving to cool completely on a wire rack.

It will be a good cake without icing, but if you want to make it look a bit more fancy then mix together icing sugar, lime juice (or lemon juice or water) with a couple of tablespoonfuls of desiccated coconut until it makes a fairly stiff icing and spread over the top of the cake.