I thought I’d share this recipe especially for those who have to avoid gluten in their diets- it isn’t nut free though.

I first saw Rachel Allen making this on the Food Channel here, and it did look good, so I made it up as cupcakes for part of DH’s birthday cupcake spread at work, and they were well received. Then I had book club at my place last week, so I decided to bake it as a whole cake for my supper table.

Now, we take supper seriously at book club, so I had a fair assortment- the cake, some friands, two kinds of sandwiches, sausage rolls, savoury tartlets, bar cookies and a large pan of tiramisu (I’d actually intended to make a smaller batch but I put in too many eggs so I ended up doubling the recipe). But, after filling up on the cheeseboard while we talked, then the sandwiches and hot savouries, by the time we’d had tiramisu and friands, everyone was too full to tackle the cake.

So the next morning I took the cake and some bar cookies in to work (where I’ve started a new job as a lab tech in a high school) and left them in the science staff room with a note asking people to please eat it up, take it home, whatever. At the end of the day I found two pieces left, which I gave to the staff room cleaner in thanks for her giving me a roll of paper towels for the lab (our lab cleaner is appallingly lazy and never replaces the paper towels, and there’s no use in complaining about her as it’s really hard to sack people here and she’s been shunted out of pretty well every other department in the school), and one of the teachers had written on the note:

”BEST CAKE EVER!!!!” which I thought was nice :-)

Since it’s clearly a good cake, here’s a link to the recipe. I found it quite easy to make, though my coconut crumb took more like 20 minutes to toast rather than 3-4.

Rachel Allen’s Chocolate Coconut Cake