Frozen lamingtons

January 23-24, 2013

After a well-deserved year off, Michael's mum Robyn has revived the recipe calendar tradition! I was quite excited that she tucked an all-new, personally curated and impeccably bound calendar into my birthday present last December. It's really back with a bang - the January recipe involved making ice cream! (I haven't been making enough, i.e. any,  icecream this summer.)

This is a cute idea - slicing chocolate frozen yoghurt into squares, dusting them with dessicated coconut to look like lamingtons, and serving them with raspberry sauce. It sounds fiddly, but it really wasn't too bad at all. Chocolate frozen yoghurt is a funny one - somehow the cocoa and cultured-dairy tang is really different to, say, a chocolate cheesecake - but it's a nice light flavour. And the raspberry sauce is a stunner, sour with a cheeky slug of Cointreau as well as the berries themselves.

We selfishly demolished the whole batch over the course of a couple weeks, but I reckon these frozen lamingtons are better suited to sharing with friends in a single sitting.

Frozen lamingtons
(most likely sourced from taste)

150g castor sugar
750g natural Greek style yoghurt
2 tablespoons cocoa
2 1/2 cups dessicated coconut

raspberry sauce
125g punnet raspberries
2 tablespoons icing sugar
1 tablespoon Cointreau, plus extra to dip

In a small saucepan, stir the castor sugar into 150mL water. Bring the mixture to the boil, then cook it for a further 2-3 minutes, continually stirring. The sugar should have dissolved to create a clear syrup. Set the syrup aside to cool.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the yoghurt, cocoa and cooled syrup. Chill the mixture for several hours, ideally overnight, and then churn it in an icecream machine. While it's churning, line a 20cm-square container with foil. Pour the icecream mixture into the tin, smooth over the top gently, cover the container and freeze the icecream until it's very firm, at least 4 hours and preferably overnight.

To make the berry sauce, place the raspberries and icing sugar in a blender and puree thoroughly. You may want to strain it to remove the seeds, but I kept them. Stir in the Cointreau.

Have your sauce, extra Cointreau and serving dishes ready, and place the dessicated coconut in a shallow bowl. Use a sharp knife dipped in hot water to cut the icecream into rectangles. Brush a little Cointreau on the sides of a 'lamington' and drop it in the coconut, shifting it around to coat all sides. Plate it up with some berry sauce underneath or on top, and repeat with the remaining icecream rectangles.