planet vegan scotland

Just to digress briefly, back when I regularly watched 'Neighbours' - an infamous Australian Soap opera - on BBC1 as a child, I remember hearing them discuss these little cakes and thinking they were called 'lemmingtons' which struck me as very odd, calling a chocolate-iced coconut rolled sponge after a rodent supposedly pre-disposed towards mass suicide off clifftops. 'Those crazy Aussies!' I thought, shrugging it off until years later when I googled it spontaneously and found I'd got it completely wrong and those tricksy Melbourne accents had thrown me off the scent!

Anyhow, the lamington is a plain sponge square dipped in chocolate icing and then rolled in desiccated coconut. You can have it as a whole sponge or split and sandwiched with cream before it's dipped in the icing. There are also regional variations on the filling - the aussies like a lemon filling while the kiwis favour strawberry jam. So being lazy yet intrigued by the variations, I decided to use strawberry yogurt as the egg replacer in my vanilla sponge and then proceed as if I were just making these soft little mouthfuls of sponge goodness plain. Plus the chocolate icing sounded like too much work and too much sugar too so I just melted a ton of chocolate instead...


Firstly, I baked the sponge. I used the recipe for vanilla cake in 'How It All Vegan!' with the aforementioned strawberry substitution - I doubled-up the recipe and then used a single serving carton of Asda's strawberry soya yogurt and that seemed to work out just fine. I baked the sponges in square pans in the morning and let them cool thoroughly before enlisting my little larakin to assist with the messy bit - dipping and rolling!


I melted seven - yes, seven! - 100g bars of dark chocolate with a tablespoon of Pure soya margarine in a saucepan and then we took turns dipping small squares of the sponge cake into the pan until we were thoroughly covered.


Immediately we rolled them in desiccated coconut I had out on a plate before transferring to a wire rack to cool. The idea is the chocolate soaks into the sponge and once it dries and hardens you get that irresistible combination of hard chocolate, chewy coconut with slightly sticky, moist sponge. Oh, yum!!!


Was it any good? I'd have to say a resounding 'yes!' thanks to the combination of textures and flavours. Plus, for any mums out there it's a really easy activity to do with small children which gives them the satisfaction of getting good and messy whilst at the same time transforming something plain into something really quite fancy looking. I'm sending a batch in to work with Skint Vegan Dad and we'll just have to work our way through the rest, I suppose... (n_n)
To all my Antipodean friends out there, Happy (belated) Australia Day!