My DMIL used to make this for us many times. It’s a great retro dessert with that quintessential Danish dessert component: a meringue-type base. Have no idea where she got the recipe from (she wrote it down by hand for me), but she used to try lots of recipes from weekly magazines for the ‘older lady’ like “Søndag” and “Ude og Hjemme”.
My DH isn’t too keen on this one (too much cream for his liking – he’s not a dairy freak like me) but, as DBIL is coming for dinner tonight, I thought we’d do a trip down memory lane.
HARRIET’S KOKOSDESSERT (Harriet’s Coconut Dessert)
4 eggwhites (I use pasteurised, see note on eggs below)
4 eggyolks (I use pasteurised, see note on eggs below)
140g + 60g (200g total) icing sugar
140g dessicated coconut
100g butter
100g chocolate (we like plain, dark chocolate best)
a small carton of whipping cream
some extra chocolate for decoration
Heat the oven to 170c.
Beat the eggwhites until very stiff, add a pinch of salt if you like. Fold in 140g icing sugar and 140g dessicated coconut. Pour into a greased, spring tin – makes it easier to get out afterwards 😉 Bake for about 45 minutes on the lowest shelf. Will look slightly golden when it’s ready. Leave to cool in the tin.
The next layer of the cake is, in modern terms, a chocolate ganache. Melt 100g butter and 100g chocolate slowly in a saucepan. Take off the heat and let it cool slightly, because we’re now going to mix in 60g icing sugar and the 4 pasteurised egg yolks. And we don’t want to cook the egg yolks or make scrambled eggs, right? Pour on top of the coconut meringue base and, at this stage, you can pop it into the fridge.
When the chocolate layer is cooled and set, you can decorate it with a few rosettes of whipped cream.
Or, as DMIL always did, cover the whole thing in whipped cream and shavings/curls of chocolate. As they say around these parts, velbekomme.
A WORD ON EGGS (Thanks to Em, for bringing this up! )
No need to use pasteurised eggs in this recipe, because the eggs are ‘cooked’ => no risk of salmonella poisoning. I use them because they’re convenient…not all recipes require equal amounts of separated yolks and whites.