Lumberjack Cake

What an awesome name for a cake!

I was all out of cake inspiration the other day, and was flicking through a River Cottage Baking supplement that came with a newspaper a while back, and stumbled across it.

It’s delicious! And *reasonably* healthy. Well, there is fruit in it…

This is what you need for the cake:

2 large eating apple
250g chopped dates (we didn’t have quite enough, so I topped up with raisins)
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
125g butter at room temp
175g light brown soft sugar
1 egg
150g plain flour
pinch ground cloves (I used about 1/4 tsp mixed spice as we had no cloves)

This is what you need for the topping:

75g butter
75g soft brown sugar-light or dark (I used dark, and it made the topping quite, well, dark. In the pic in the book it just looks like lightly toasted desiccated coconut, so maybe I should have used light brown)
60g desiccated coconut
75ml milk

This is what you do:

Pre-heat the oven to 180C (Gas mark 4)
Coarsely grate the apples into a bowl, avoiding the core
Add the chopped dates and bicarb, and 250ml boiling water. Stir and leave to one side
In a separate bowl, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy
“Arty shot”
Beat in the egg, and then the apple/date mix
Add the flour and ground cloves/mixed spice and mix carefully (it will be shloppy)
Pour into a lightly greased and base-lined 20cm round tin (or an 18cm square tin)
Bake for about 40mins until quite firm to the touch
While it is in the oven, prepare the topping: place all the topping ingredients in a small saucepan and stir over a low heat until the butter has melted
After the 40-ish minutes, take the cake out of the oven and spread the coconut mix on top
Bake for another 25-30 minutes until the topping is golden and the cake is cooked through (poke it with a skewer, if the skewer comes out clean, it’s done)
Leave in the tin until completely cook, and then turn out
If you aren’t going to gobble it all down within about 3 days, keep it in the fridge

Needless to say, I forgot to take a pic of the finished thing before we’d eaten it. But it was yummy. I wasn’t sure if the kids would eat it with the coconut on top, but they loved it too!