Madhouse recipe : Pineapple & Coconut Dream Cake

As if I'm not busy enough already, I've recently been drawn into following a new challenge based on one of the American blogs I follow, called The Great British Baking Show Bake Off. It's based on The Great British Bake Off and it looks like being a lot of fun, so I've decided to join in too. If you want to find out more, you'll need to join up on the facebook group. Well, this week's challenge was for a Fruity Cake - made from scratch, must include either dried or fresh fruit, a cake with fruit in it rather than a fruit cake ... OK !

Errr well, OK, but as they're mainly Americans (and a couple of other randoms like me, including a Brit living in America and an Ausralian !), I had to scratch my head and come up with something a bit different. This Pineapple & Coconut Dream Cake is a souped up (ie with extra pineapple) version of a Danish Drommekage, which translates as Dream Cake. You can see my original inspiration for the cake on the Nordic Food Living blog - adding a can of pineapple is purely down to me (apologies to any Danish followers !)

Pineapple & Coconut Dream Cake

ingredients :

cake :

250g flour

2tsp baking powder

250g sugar

50g butter

3 eggs

200ml milk

1 can pineapple slices minus 2 slices

topping :

125g butter

50ml milk

200g brown sugar

100g coconut flakes/slices

the remaining 2 slices of pineapple

Switch on the oven to preheat to 190°. Whisk together the eggs and sugar until they're nice and light and fluffy.

Melt the butter (in a saucepan or in the microwave, whatever you prefer) then mix in the milk. 

Add to the first bowl. 

Mix together the flour and baking powder and mix in to the batter.

Finely chop most of a drained tin of pineapple rings (keep a couple of rings back to add to the topping) and add to the mixture. Stir to combine everything.

Take a cake tin and line it with baking parchment. Pour in the batter and put it in the oven for 25 minutes. While the cake is baking, prepare the topping.

Put the butter in a saucepan and heat until it melts, then add the milk and brown sugar and bring to the boil. Keep it boiling for 1 minute then add the coconut flakes and desiccated coconut (I mixed them up, as I was clearing out the baking cupboard.) I also added in the finely chopped remaining pineapple rings.

Pour the "icing" mixture over the top of the cake and return to the oven for 5 minutes.

Leave to cool in the tin before carefully pulling it out and removing the baking parchment.

You get a dainty, light sponge cake topped with a luscious, buttery, coconut topping. Hmmmm ! This has been in the kitchen all week being nibbled and it just gets better the longer you leave it - I finished off the last piece after dinner today, rats !

Linking up with the #KitchenClearout linky as this used up a tin of pineapple, some dried coconut slices and an end of a bag of brown sugar that were cluttering up the kitchen cupboards.