Coconut Cake / Bibikkan Recipe

Bibikkan or Coconut Cake is truly a Sri Lankan Avurudu celebration cake. This rich and dark cake is bit similar to a Christmas cake, but, the taste is very different and unique.

Ingredients:

• Scraped Coconut – 250g
• Kithul Treacle – 340ml
• All-purpose Flour – 150g
• Eggs – 03
• Ground cardamom, cinnamon & cloves mixture – 01 tsp
• Baking Powder – 01 tsp
• Chopped Dates – 100g
• Chopped Cashew – 100g
• Plums – 50g
• Vanilla – 01 tsp
• Salt – 01 tsp

Method:

• Heat treacle in a pan. Here don’t use all treacle. Keep small amount aside so that we can use them after baking the cake.
• Instead of Kithul Treacle you can use Coconut Treacle, Sugar and Jaggery as well.
• Add ground cloves, cardamom & cinnamon mixture and salt.
• Add coconut and let it simmer for few minutes.
• Switch off the flame when the moisture is there. Let it cool down to room temperature.
• Meanwhile, beat eggs well.
• Mix flour with baking powder. If there are any lumps in your flour sieve it well before adding it to Pani Pol.
• Add beaten eggs to Pani Pol & mix. Don’t add eggs when Pani Pol mixture is hot. If so, it will boil the egg.
• Add flour and mix thoroughly to combine. After adding flour, it will reduce the color of our cake. If you want it to be too dark, make your Pani Pol mixture too darker.
• Add cashew, dates, plums & vanilla.
• Mix heavily to combine all ingredients together.
• Transfer the mixture into a baking pan and bake the cake around 45mins under 180° Celcius.
• After baking get the cake out of the oven and apply treacle on the cake. This needs to be done when the cake is hot. Then it absorbs treacle well giving more taste and moisture to the cake.
• Let the cake cool down and serve.