Recipes

Everything at the Brisbane establishment Café Ô-mai is inexplicity, undeniably, unreasonably good. It’s been years since I’ve been there, due to not having been back in Brisbane for a while, but still I drool at the mere thought of the tamarind tang and lemongrass freshness of their claypot brekkie, the unfathomly favourful depths of their phở, the crisp-unchy sensory explosion of their bánh mì, all of which make you wonder: Ô-mai, how is this much goodness even possible?! In other words, if you are unlucky enough to find yourself in Brisbane, do yourself a flavour and book yourself a table before heading to Café Ô-mai (seriously, definitely book if you’re going there, it’s a busy place).

But I digress, and I hate food blogs that digress. This post is about cake.

This cake is inspired by Café Ô-mai’s pineapple coconut cake, for which I’ve never been able to find a recipe and I’ve just got my memory to go on. We also don’t get much pineapple here. But we do get mandarins, and I found myself with mandarins to spare one day thanks to our wonderful food-share program. So I decided to try it with mandarins, and it was pretty good – actually really good – just not as good as Café Ô-mai’s pineapple coconut cake. Which is not surprising, as I rarely have eggs on hand, I’ve changed one of the main ingredients, and don’t ice it. But I’ll keep tweaking the recipe until I get closer. Notes on changing the recipe are below.

Take 1. This makes a rather cake-like cake, rather than the coconut dominated deliciousness that is Café Ô-mai’s version. But is is pretty tasty.

• 2c flour + baking powder
• 3/4c sugar
• 1 1/4 c coconut – ideally the unsweetened, long shredded type which helps to bind things together
• 1/3c flax seed, ground
• 1/3 c chia seed
• 5 smallish mandarins – the ones I used are thin-skinned, seedless, and sweet
• 1/2 c of oil

Oven to 180C. Prep a cake pan – I used a lamington pan, maybe 20cm by 30cm by 6cm deep, lined.

Mix all the dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Remove the green stalky bit from the mandarins, and break into halves to make sure they don’t have seeds. Throw them into a blender with the oil, peel and all, and wizz up well. Fold into the dry mix. Add water until you get a thick cake batter / muffin-like consistency. I needed maybe 1/2 a cup.

Pour into the prepped pan, and bake. Mine needed about 35 mins. Let cool a little before turning out to a rack to cool further.

Recipe notes:

• Their version is gluten and dairy free. My version is clearly not gluten free, but could easily sub in other flour here. I am also gradually reducing the flour:coconut ratio to allow the coconut to really shine.
• Flaxseed here is used to replace what I suspect should be eggs, which I never seem to have on hand when I want. Sure the supermarket is only a few blocks away, but I am not reasonable in that way. I suspect the ideal would be to use several eggs, and whip the whites and fold them in. Possibly use the yolks as well for richness.
• The chia seed is more for fun, a little nod to the citrus-poppyseed cakes of the 90’s. There is no seed obvious in their version.
• Using normal desiccated coconut will give the same flavour, just will result in less texture / a denser texture. And for me, half the awesomeness of the pineapple coconut cake is the texture.
• Looks like they use a simple lemon icing-sugar based icing, with toasted coconut on top. On a mandarin version, I reckon a lemon cream cheese icing would be pretty good too.

I stole this photo from a food blogger – just to prove to myself I’m not making it up.