Lemon Coconut Butter Cake

Yesterday my little monkey turned 8 months old. For the whole week I was convinced that her birthday was today. I had somehow calculated the dates and worked out that today (Sunday) was the 10th of September. DOH!!!
It was only on the way home from the market when Boone and I were checking out the signs around the corner from our house, announcing the EID festival, that I realised that her birthday was going past and I had been totally unaware.

I had planned to invite my parents over for lunch today, and bake a little cake. We had bought the food at the market for that purpose, when I got home I decided that I would invite my parents to come to dinner (last night) instead.

I was going to give the Dairy Free Spelt Chocolate cake another go, this time replacing all the sugar with Coconut Sugar.

When I was re-reading the recipe, I realised that since the amount of cocoa the chocolate cake had in was so small, it probably meant that it could replaced with any other flavour. So I set out to make a lemon cake instead. I did some more replacements, and came out with a new recipe. I think it still requires some tweaking, but it was delicious. My mum said it was one of the most delicious cakes she'd had (a slight exaggeration, maybe??). The amount of sugar will need to be reduced quite a bit I think, it was quite sweet, maybe taking it down by 50-80gms may work, we'll see, because sugar does add to the cake structure, it is not only used as a sweetener. I will try it out on cupcakes next month for my nephew's birthday.

Another thing that requires tweaking is the amount of lemon. The amount of lemon juice is fine I think, but maybe it requires a little less lemon rind, cutting it by a third or even half may work better. I will also try this out in the next incarnation of this recipe.

All in all, a very successful try, yummy, and a lot healthier than other cakes around. If you give this cake to anyone out there, there will never know that it is lower GI (due to the use of coconut sugar instead of cane sugar) , high in healthy fats (coconut oil) and goodness knows what else, I'm sure a nutritionist could probably tell you by examining the ingredients used :)

Please note that I have included links to the ingredients used to make it easier for anyone wanting to make this cake to find the "hard to find" ingredients :), or not so common ingredients. I have also posted the recipe exactly as I made it, not with the tweaks I plan to make in future.

Ingredients

205gms white spelt flour
220gms Coconut Sugar
7gms Gluten Free Baking Powder
20gms grated lemon rind (approximately the rind of one lemon)
70gms Coconut Butter/Oil
250gms Rice Milk
20gms Lemon Juice (approximately the juice of half a lemon)


Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celcius.
2. Grease and flour a 20cm ring pan (Brush with coconut oil and dust with spelt flour).
3. Place all dry ingredients, including lemon rind in a food processor.
4. Process dry ingredients to remove any lumps, this saves time on sifting :D
5. Melt coconut oil, together with rice milk and lemon juice. You don't want this to become at all hot or warm, you can simply put your coconut oil in a jug or bowl and place it inside another bowl with hot water. It does melt pretty quickly. Mix it thoroughly with the other wet ingredients.
6. Pour wet ingredients over dry ingredients and process until just combined. You may need to scrape the sides with a spatula. Do not over mix.
7. Pour into pan, and bake for approximately 35 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean.

Verdict	Future Tweaks
	Reduce amount of sugar. Reduce amount of lemon rind.