Mini-lamingtons

Note: This is a backlog post.

Sometimes good things come out of silly mistakes.

I hadn't set out to make "mini" anything. As usual, I was thinking about what I could do on the weekend, and if there was anything I should do. It hit me that I'd been living in New Zealand for the last 7 years, and I had yet to do something that was iconically Kiwi. I was absolutely not going to attempt the pavlova, because I have never done meringue and I wasn't about to make my first attempt at meringue a whole cake of it! However, I'd had lamingtons at a potluck flatwarming earlier this year, for the first time ever since coming to New Zealand, if you can believe it. It was gorgeous, large squares of sponge cake in chocolate ganache and coated with shredded coconut.

[I know someone's going to think it: yes, Kiwis and Aussies debate about the origins of both the pavlova and the lamington. I don't know the foods' actual origins *laughs*]

So I set out to make lamingtons according to the instructions of this recipe from AllRecipes (a website which I loooove for its resources, and especially its features to automatically convert from US to Metric and to automatically recalculate ingredients based on the number of servings.) 24 servings seemed like too much, though, so I decided to halve it.

Here's where things (or rather, I) got a bit dumb. I don't know how, but I got it into my head that a 9X9 cake pan would tooooootally work for half the ingredients, for a full-height cake. Oh dear. Of course, it didn't, and I wound up with a cake that was only an inch high. Oops. After wringing my hands a little bit, I figured that I had two options: 1) make lamingtons in inch-sized cubes, or 2) make 'sandwiches' by cutting out 2x2 pieces of cake and sandwiching them together with a layer of jam before icing them.

I decided I could probably try both ways, starting with the mini version, and if that didn't work out I could switch to the sandwich version. In the end I liked the mini version so much I decided to stick with that; well that and I was having a lot of trouble with the icing and decided not to press my luck with the larger, sandwich version, heh. There was also something about the petiteness of the finished mini-lamingtons that I adored; they just look so dainty and cute.

The end result was very, intensely sweet; perhaps the icing to cake ratio is a lot higher for such little things. Good thing I have a sweet tooth, but it was still just a bit too sweet. Next time I would probably try to use a bit more water in the icing to dilute the sweetness a bit. But I'm just glad that my mistake didn't cause a total disaster!