The lamington in Sydney: what it is, how to order it, what to avoid

Overview

The lamington is a national sweet rather than a Sydney one — it belongs to all of Australia, its origins lie north in Queensland, and it is claimed across the water in New Zealand too — but it is on every café and bakery counter here, and it is the cake a visitor is most likely to be handed with a cup of tea. It is a cube of plain sponge or butter cake, dipped in a thin chocolate icing and then rolled all over in desiccated coconut, so that it arrives as a dark, faintly furry square that eats far lighter than it looks.

The chocolate is not a thick ganache but a thin, almost runny icing that soaks a little way into the sponge and sets to a soft shell; the coconut is there for texture and to stop your fingers, not for flavour. A good one is moist inside and just barely holds its shape; a bad one is dry and crumbles to a chocolate-and-coconut rubble on the plate.

Its origin is a good story, and mostly a story. It is generally credited to Queensland around the turn of the twentieth century and named for Lord Lamington, a colonial governor of the day; the fond tale that a kitchen maid dropped a block of sponge into melted chocolate and rolled it in coconut to hide the mess is the kind of neat origin that historians treat with a raised eyebrow. Worth telling, not worth repeating as fact — what is certain is that it is old, that it belongs to Queensland, and that the country has argued about it ever since.

What to order

There is not much to specify — a lamington is a lamington — but there are two versions and it helps to know which you are getting.

• The plain lamington is sponge, chocolate and coconut, and nothing else. This is the classic and the one a café means by the word.
• The jam-and-cream lamington is split through the middle and filled with a layer of red jam and whipped cream. It is more of a dessert than a morning-tea cake, and some argue it is gilding a thing that did not need it — but it is common and it is good.

Where you buy it changes it. A bakery or café lamington is made that day and soft; a fundraiser or Country Women’s Association cake stall — the lamington is the fixture of the school fete and the charity “lamington drive” — is often the best and cheapest of all; a supermarket six-pack in plastic is the convenient, drier compromise.

What to avoid

The whole risk with a lamington is dryness, and it is mostly visible.

A cracked, hard chocolate shell is the first sign — the icing should be soft and slightly tacky, not a brittle crust that has dried for days. If it looks matte and fissured, the cake under it is stale.

A crumbling square is the second. A fresh lamington is moist enough to hold together under a fork; one that shatters into dry cake and loose coconut the moment you cut it has been sitting too long, whatever the counter looks like.

And treat the plastic-wrapped supermarket version as what it is — a serviceable snack, not the real thing. It will not be bad, but it will be drier and sweeter than one made that morning, and if you have the choice, the bakery or the fete stall is worth crossing the road for.

Practicalities

A lamington runs roughly $4 to $6 each at a café or bakery, less from a supermarket multipack, and least of all at a charity or school stall, where they are sold by the dozen for a good cause and are frequently the best you will eat. It is an inexpensive cake and a dear one is buying the café, not a better lamington.

It is morning- and afternoon-tea food, eaten with coffee or tea rather than as a dessert (unless it is the filled version), and it is available all year with no season to it. Buy it the day you eat it: a lamington is at its best fresh and soft, and a day or two turns the sponge dry and the coconut dull. Cards work everywhere, as the city guide notes, so a bakery or a stall is no trouble to pay.