SHF # 43: coconut lime cake with mango and mascarpone lime mousse

Like Helen, of the beautiful blog tartelette, I'm a big fan of anything citrus. So when she chose citrus as the theme of this month's Sugar High Friday, I couldn't have been happier. And I immediately got Harry Nilsson's coconut, one of my all-time favourite songs, stuck in my head. I first heard it when watching Practical Magic and I have actually watched the film again just for the song. It's sweet and silly and makes me laugh. I can thoroughly recommend this song, especially on a blegh and grey day. So, SHF. I wanted to make something pretty and tropical, and after going through some cookbooks, browsing a few blogs, and taking cue from the coconut song, I decided on a combo of coconut and lime with mango, in the shape of little cakes with fruit and mousse layer. Something I'd never tried before, but it didn't look all that difficult - baking a cake? I could do that half asleep. Chopping up some fruit? Easy peasy. And whipping up a mousse? five minutes' work.

For the cake base, I chose Delia's coconut lime cake. A bit risky, since I hadn't made this cake before, but I find that Delia usually delivers. And deliver she did. The cake didn't rise very high, but it turned out quite well - I knew I could trust our Delia. The mango, unfortunately, didn't deliver. Instead of the sweet juicy and orangey-yellow fruit I was imagining, I got a hard pale and rather sour mango. That will teach me for buying mangoes out of season I guess. I should have waited for those incredibly sweet small yellow Pakistani mangoes I will find at my local market in a month or so. But all was not lost, I added a few spoons of sugar and some vanilla bean paste, which made it ok. Not great, but more than edible.

For the mousse, I browsed Bea's and Helen's archives, but all the recipes I found had gelatine in them, and I have a very strong dislike for the stuff. A google search only returned gelatine-based mousses as well, so I took a risk, and luckily it worked. I used Helen's mascarpone lime mousse recipe, but left out the gelatine and the lime zest (another thing I don't like), without changing anything else. I figured, with the whipped egg whites and whipped cream, the mousse would set in the fridge. After all, my chocolate mousse and tiramisu set in the fridge, so no reason why this mousse wouldn't set either. And I was right, phew. It might not work in hot or humid climes though. I guess that's the one good thing about living in grey and temperate London.


Getting the whole thing assembled took a bit of fiddling, but wasn't too hard. Of course I started with grand plans: I had wanted to add a frozen cone with coconut yoghurt and mango purée, like this one, put a glaze on the cakes, and add a cilantro syrup. But in between all the weekend DIY, finally getting to meet our friends' new baby, and getting engaged (yes, after almost 12 years together S proposed), I didn't get around to executing all those grand plans. They will have to wait for another time. That evening, S and I cracked open a bottle of champagne and had a simple but lovely pasta dinner, followed by these cakes were our dessert. Surprisingly, S really liked it. Separately, the three components weren't great: the cake was a bit fibrey with all the desiccated coconut, the mango not ripe and the lime mousse not very sweet, but together they were just right. A sweet end to a wonderful day...

a taste of yellow

With lots of DIY planned for the long bank-holiday weekend, I didn’t have any ambitious baking plans, though I did plan to whip up something for A Taste of Yellow. Barbara of Winos and Foodies is the instigating force behind this food event, which has been approved by the Lance Armstrong Foundation as an official LiveStrong event to raise cancer awareness (LiveStrong Day 2007 will take place on 16 May). Barbara writes: “there isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t been touched by cancer in some way” and that is sadly true of course.

About six weeks ago, M, a dear friend of mine, died of cancer. She was only 34. We first met at uni at our postgraduate degree in Asian art history – a wonderful year, with lots of dinner parties and in which strong worldwide friendships were forged. After graduating, M decided to stay in London and went on to do a PhD while I got myself a job. Both of us being busy people, we saw each other only occasionally, but we kept our fooding tradition going. When she started having stomach problems – and with the NHS living up to its reputation – she decided to go back home to Taiwan for a proper check-up. By the time her cancer was diagnosed, it had already spread. Unfortunately she gave up without a fight, refusing all conventional treatment (because it made her so sick and miserable), trying some herbal remedies instead and refusing to see any of her friends. I, along with our other common friends, felt frustrated and helpless, reading about her suffering in the occasional email she managed to write, but unable to do something. All we could do was send her encouraging emails, urging her not to give up. She wouldn’t have made 80, and probably not even 50, but I can’t help thinking she could have had a good few years left. However, seeing as there is nothing I could have done, I decided to make do with A Taste of Yellow.

With some vague ideas floating around in my head, I didn’t think it would be that difficult to create some sort of yellow food. Right? Hmmm, let’s see. Bread pudding with leftover raisin and cinnamon bread – bread seemed to have moulded overnight. Something with mango – nope, only one sorry-looking rock-hard mango in my fruit bowl. Banana cake – those overripe bananas I had frozen turned out all mushy, looking and smelling rather disgusting. Freezing bananas obviously doesn’t work.

Luckily I did have another bunch of rather ripe bananas and some nectarines. Since I spent most of the weekend sanding skirting boards (and cursing the man who plastered the walls, such a shoddy job, but that’s England for you) I went with an easy, tried and tested, good old Delia recipe for banana walnut loaf, which is published on her website. Having sliced the finished cake in little squares, I tried icing the squares, but my icing technique (I used icing sugar and water mixed into a paste) obviously needs a lot of work still. To jazz the whole lot up a little, I found inspiration in D&C Duby's Wild Sweets in the shape of nectarine carpaccio. I don’t have a mandoline, so I just tried slicing the nectarine as thinly as possible. The slices were then ‘marinaded’ for a few hours in simple syrup (equal measures of water and sugar, boiled and stored in a closed container) with added vanilla bean paste, and draped on top of the cake square. Et voilà, a yellow(ish) cake thingy. Which I'm sure M would have enjoyed.

cake on request

Since S so sweetly requested a marbled cake, what else could I do but strap on my apron and start baking? It was the ideal occasion to use the cake mould my granny had given me recently. She had bought it aeons ago (the price label on the box is in Belgian francs – that long ago), only used it once and she knows I love baking so thought I would put it to better use than her.

The recipe I used is my family’s version of the classic quatre quarts, or pound cake, and is a complete doddle to make.

4 eggs (separated, whites whipped)
250g butter (softened)
250g sugar (including some vanilla sugar)
250g flour (self-raising or with baking powder)

Cream the butter with sugar, add egg yolks, fold in egg whites, add flour et voilà: basic cake dough. For a marbled cake, take a blob of dough and mix in some cocoa powder, until you’re happy with the cocoa-ness of it. Butter your cake mould, bung in a layer of plain dough, followed by a chocolate layer, another layer of plain dough and bake at 150˚C for about 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.

The mould I used was smaller than the one I normally use, leaving me with quite a bit of leftover dough. Which mysteriously diminished every time S paid a visit to the kitchen. But still, there was enough left for me to finally try something with that unopened pack of matcha I’d had sitting in my pantry for so long and never got around to using. So I mixed a bit of matcha in the dough until the whole thing was sufficiently green, and baked it in rectangular mini moulds. The resulting mini cakes were deliciously moist, with a very subtle matcha taste – the bitterness of the tea nicely counterbalanced the sweetness of the cake.

Yummy though it was (even S approved), it did look a bit plain. So, in a vain effort to try and make it look a bit more professional and posh, I played around a bit with the presentation, plating it with strawberries, raspberry coulis and a dusting of icing sugar. The whole thing ended up looking as if the strawberries had been violently slaughtered on the cake, but the tart fruit and coulis nicely complemented the bitter matcha.

And the end result? I was happy I could finally used my ‘new’ baking mould and the matcha powder, and S was a very happy bunny indeed with his marbled cake. if only all happiness was as simple as a nice piece of cake…

the ultimate carrot cake

This is the first carrot cake I’ve ever baked, so whether it’s really the ‘ultimate’ one, I couldn’t say. Delia claims it is though, so ultimate it is. Now I have a little secret to confess: I’m not a big Delia fan. Ever watched one of her programmes on tv? She’s got such an enthusiasm for life (feel the irony here) and I find her annoyingly pedantic – telling people how to boil eggs or peel tomatoes. But maybe British people need to be told these things, I don’t know. The woman knows how to cook though, I have to admit that, and over the years I have become a huge fan of her recipes.

mise en place

A few years ago, someone at work who had just met me – and quickly figured out I liked cooking and baking – gave me Delia’s Vegetarian Collection as a christmas gift. This quickly became one of my favourite cookbooks and I, in turn, have given copies to quite a few friends, who all love the book as well. Every single thing I make from it just works, whether I follow the recipe to the letter, or muck around with it. I now trust Ms D to such an extent, I would even risk trying a new recipe from this book for a dinner party, since I know it will turn out well. Well, I wouldn’t actually, because I’m a Virgo and hence a perfectionist and a bit of a control freak, but you catch my drift.

Back to the carrot cake now. When I was a child, we used to have a ‘carrot cake joke’, which goes as follows: a rabbit enters a bakery and asks the baker: ‘Do you sell carrot cake?’ (this bit has to be said in a rabbit-like voice, of course). Baker says no, he has never even heard of carrot cake, rabbit leaves. This scenario repeats itself daily, until the baker one day decides to make a carrot cake, because the rabbit might be on to something there – after all, rabbits know their carrots. So the next day, when the rabbit enters the bakery and asks: ‘Do you have carrot cake?’, the baker proudly replies yes. To which the rabbit says ‘It’s disgusting, don’t you think?’. Silly, I know, but it seemed hilarious when I was young(er). When I told my brother on the phone I was making carrot cake, his initial reaction was something similar. Until I told him what goes in it. Not that much carrot. And it doesn’t taste the slightest bit of carrots. I wonder why it’s even called carrot cake at all. But I guess that must be a British thing.

I tweaked the original recipe a bit – I left out the orange zest (yuk) and dessicated coconut (yuk again), added some dried apricot, forgot to add the goji berries I had planned to throw in as well, substituted walnuts for pecans, added some oats, and used molasses alongside the soft dark brown sugar. I threw the whole lot into the oven, and an hour later a mountain of moist, yet crumbly deliciousness emerged, which I brushed with a lemon-orange syrup to moisten it even more. One word of advice, when Ms D says to line the cake tin with baking paper, there’s a very good reason to do exactly what she says. Otherwise, after you’ve doused the cake with the syrup, it will stick to the tin. And fall to pieces when you try to exact the cake from the tin. How do I know that? Hmm, let’s not go there. And no, the fact I wrapped my cake in paper for the pictures has nothing to do with this piece of advice whatsoever …