This recipe is inspired by Antonio Carluccio and Gennaro Contaldo from their wonderful book Two Greedy Italians Eat Italy. You can find their recipe in the book or on the BBC website.
This cake is rich and filling so don’t do what I did and cut yourself a huge slice because you will struggle to finish it! Especially if you have it after the Chestnut Gnocchi! I’d say it’s a brilliant carb loader cake if you’re a runner like me.
My lime and coconut twist on this Italian rice cake
You’ll need
- 2 tins of coconut milk
- 1 litre whole milk
- Rind of 2 limes
- 200g caster sugar
- 300g arborio rice
- 5 large eggs
- 60 freshly squeezed lime juice
- 2 tbsp dessicated coconut
- Zest of 5 limes
To make it
- Grease and line a 24cm baking tin and set aside.
- Put the coconut milk, milk, lime rind and sugar in a large saucepan and bring it to the boil. It looks like a lot of liquid but trust me it all gets sucked up beautifully.
- Simmer for about 30 minutes until the rice is al dente like risotto.
- Take it off the heat and pour it to a very large mixing bowl to cool. This took about an hour.
- Preheat the oven to 180C.
- Separate the eggs and whisk up the whites. Set aside.
- Take the lime rind out of the rice.
- In a bowl, whisk the yolks gently and then add the lime juice and mix this into the rice so it’s evenly distributed.
- Fold in the egg whites gently and carefully and finally add in most of the lime zest saving a little to decorate the top once the cake is baked.
- Pour the mixture into your prepared cake tin and bake for an hour and 15 minutes. It will puff up and rise so I would suggest a deep cake tin. If it starts to brown too much on top, just cover that with a little baking paper so it doesn’t get burned.
- Take the cake out of the oven and let it cool. It will sink back down into the tin.
- Take it out of the cake tin and then when cooled completely sprinkle over some icing sugar and lime zest.
This works well with Green or Lemon Tea.