Late to the Party

This is my birthday cake. It looks better than last year's which is a bit of a relief!

Coconut and cherries make this just a bit more special than that plain golden exterior suggests. It might have been nice with icing but it's sweet enough already and so I decided to keep it simple. With a good cup of coffee it's phenomenal.

Ingredients

450g self raising flour (use plain with an extra tsp. of baking powder)
120g desiccated coconut
1 tsp baking powder
300g caster sugar
200g glace cherries
125ml vegetable oil
400ml (1 tin) coconut milk, full fat is best.
1 tbsp white vinegar (I used rice but anything, even cider vinegar is fine)
1/2 tsp almond essence (or maraschino flavouring or coconut essence)

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Ensure your oven is really at this temperature, too hot will ruin everything.

2. Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl and stir in the coconut and sugar.

3. Rinse the sticky syrup off the cherries and allow to dry, cut them in half if you like then toss in a couple of teaspoonfuls of flour to coat. This is supposed to stop the cherries from sinking and may have some good effect.

4. Combine all the wet ingredients in another bowl. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients all at once and mix in gently but thoroughly.

5. Pour half the batter into a greased 23cm/9in springform cake tin and sprinkle the cherries over, then add the rest the batter and level off. Bake for about 55 mins to 1 hour, until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin.

6. Turn the cake out of the tin and serve with coffee. If you serve the cake warm you could put a sweet sauce with it and call it pudding.