Pineapple and Coconut Cake
It’s Black History Month and we’re having a fuddle at work. Our office needs little excuse to plan an office get together over food. I’ve put a stone on since working here…
Today’s lunch, in honour of the members of our team who are of Carribean descent. We’ve had goat curry, rice and peas, plantain… on the sweet front, my first option would have been sweet potato pie, but this got taken, as did black cake - which was option two. So I decided to make a tropical homage, a pineapple and coconut cake, which due to the dietary requirements of a lovely colleague, needs to be dairy free.
Ingredients
8 oz (250gs) Rapeseed Oil
6 oz Self Raising Flour
2 oz coconut flour
50gs of desiccated coconut - reconstituted in coconut milk or water
8 oz Caster Suger
4 Eggs
430 gramme tin of pineapple pieces drained and blitzed with a third of the juice
Another tin to put half whole pieces in the cake and make some pineapple jam with the last half.
Half a lemons work of juice.
Pinch of salt.
Jam
Half the can of pineapple with the remaining juice
A juicy lemons worth of juice
2 dessert spoons of jam
Icing
500 mls of coconut cream.
3-4 dessert spoons of icing sugar
Method
Start by leaving the desiccated coconut to soak in a bowl of enough coconut milk or water to cover, for half an hour. Grease and line with baking paper, two 8” loose bottomed ( everyone loves a loose bottomed girl) baking tins.
Put the coconut porridge, with the contents of the first can of pineapple, after removing two thirds of the can of juice into the blender - I find my nutribullet works best (still not making the healthy smoothies my mum thought I would) and blend for 2-3 minutes - should be a smoothish paste.
Add this mixture to the four eggs, oil and sugar in a large bowl with the lemon juice, salt and give the wet ingredients a thorough mix. Once mixed, add in the two types of flour and gently mix until all blended together. Half the batter between the two tins. Chop up half of the second can of pineapple chunks sprinkle over the two pans of batter mix.
My fan oven takes about 30-40 minutes on 160°, but I check from about 30 mins onwards, using the knife test.
For the jam, add the remaining half a can of pineapple, all the juice, two dessert spoons of sugar, the juice of a lemon and slowly bring up to a low bubble - slow to stop the sugar crystalising and to stay in control of the heat so it doesn’t boil over. Let it bubble for 5-10 minutes, until the pineapple starts to soften and caramelise, keep an eye that the liquid doesn’t evaporate too much - you may need to add a little water as this cooks.
For the icing - add the two cartons of pineapple cream and the icing sugar to a large bowl, use the electric hand beater on off first - to mix in the icing sugar and then turn the beaters on to whip the mixture for 4-5 minutes - should end up like softly whipped double cream.
When the cake is cooled - pierce with a skewer and drizzle some pineapple juice over. ( I would have drizzled coconut rum if I weren’t bringing it to work.
Put half the pineapple jam on each half and dollop the coconut cream on top of this. Put whichever half turns out with the pretties dollops on top of the other. I used the snack packs of coconut and crystalised pineapple to decorate the top of the cake.
Top tips
Don’t know why I decided to use coconut flour, I thought it may make it more coconutty, but it doesn’t. What is does do, is absorb the liquid from the pineapple, and with the addition of a couple of dessert spoons of the pineapple juice, makes a very moist cake.