Melt and Mix Chocolate Coconut Cake - My Birthday Girl!

It was one of those weeks in our household where I needed an easy option for a birthday cake as I think I have mentioned before that birthdays in the M household are all extremely close together. In fact, Miss 11 and Miss 6 are only one day apart from each other!! This year Miss 6 was having her first official party with her little friends from school, but over the last few years, Miss 11 has had to share one or two cakes with her younger sister. With that in mind I set about trying to find something fast and simple that Miss 11 could take to school and feel special with. This particular cake was from two different books both being Donna Hay ones. The Kit Kats and the M and M's caught my attention for the "simple" part I was after and I can't actually recall which of my many books this came from but the actual cake under all those yummy chocolates was from a very well used Donna Hay book that I use often, called "Donna Hay - Modern Classics - Book 2". The cake itself was a first for me and just as simple as the decorations but extremely yummy (Miss 11 brought home one remaining piece that I was allowed to sample). It tasted like a Golden Rough and the combination of chocolate and coconut was down right delicious (even if I do say so myself).

The cake tin I used was a 24cm round cake tin but the beauty of this cake is that you could make it as big or small as you want and yes you could do something that I personally would NEVER do and use a packet mix for your actual cake (not mentioning any names but you know who you all are - packet queen peeps!!). In saying that the bigger the cake the more KitKats you will need, I had to buy 3 packets of the snack size Kitkats as it took 24 of them and there is only 11 in each packet (I most probably needed 3 packets regardless as you all know my fetish for chocolate). You only need one packet of the mini mm's but it's the large packet that I bought.

You will need:
250g melted butter
3/4 cup sifted cocoa powder
1 1/3 cups caster sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups desiccated coconut
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup of milk

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees and grease your 24 cm round cake tin. Melt your butter and place it a large bowl.

Add your sifted cocoa powder, caster sugar, eggs, desiccated coconut, plain flour, baking powder and milk to your melted butter and whisk until smooth.

Pour into your greased tin and bake for 50 minutes.

After your cake is cool,  ice and serve or if you don't want to put all those decorations on it you can dust with cocoa powder and serve warm or cold with thick cream!
I don't have a recipe for the icing I have made as I tend to make most of my icing just from my head and a way that I was taught by my Mother which just involves icing sugar, a knob of butter and some milk to combine it together (for chocolate just add cocoa powder).

YUM!! M x