The Supper Club

Diesmal besuchen wir Australien und genießen leckere Schokoladenkokosnuss-küchlein. Von LORRAINE MALLINDER

Lamingtons: the Australian cake that has its own national day

Australia’s favourite cake is a simple affair — involving a simple square of sponge covered in chocolate and coconut. Be careful, though: you’ll always want another lamington, also known as a “lammo”. One is simply never enough.

Sink your teeth into one of these beauties and you’ll understand why they’re sold in every cake shop down under. The lamington even has its own national day: 21 July. And in case you were wondering, the largest lammo ever made weighed in at an incredible 2,361 kilograms.

As with all culinary icons, there’s not much agreement on who invented the lammo. Most believe it was French chef Armand Galland, who worked for a Lord Lamington during his time as governor of Queensland, from 1896 to 1901.

Asked to create a gourmet dinner for unexpected guests, the highly inventive Galland cut up some leftover sponge and covered it in sticky chocolate and coconut. Et voilà!

Or perhaps not. Some say a butterfingered maid working for Lamington accidentally dropped the sponge in some chocolate, then sprinkled coconut flakes over it to make it look, well … less accidental. A happy mistake, as it turned out.

Either way, the guests at Lamington’s house in the town of Toowoomba went crazy for the dessert, begging for the recipe after dinner. By 1901, the cake’s reputation had spread across the land and its recipe appeared in a Sydney newspaper.

It seems strange that such a simple cake should have become so popular. But consider that coconut was not much used in cooking at the time. Galland’s wife, who came from Tahiti, had a particular liking for the exotic ingredient.

Lamington is said to have referred to the cake as “those bloody poofy woolly biscuits”. The British aristocrat actually wasn’t that well liked, perhaps because he once shot a sleeping koala. This might explain why some people prefer to think the cake was named after Lady Lamington.

It’s possible. Lamington’s far more charming wife, Mary Houghton Hozier, known for her good works, had opened a cookery school in Brisbane. Teacher Amy Schauer is thought to have named the cake after her.

Aussies are very protective of their iconic recipes — which is why an April Fool article in The Guardian in 2014 provoked an uproar by saying the cake had been invented in New Zealand. Worse still, it called the cake a “Wellington”! Definitely not fair dinkum.

The truth is, there are variations of the lamington in many parts of the world — such as the round Scottish snowball and the South African porcupine. But if you ever visit the land of the lammo, you’d better keep that under your hat. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.