You can't always get what you want

America is, undoubtedly, a land of plenty.  But every so often I'll come across something that just isn't easily available here.

Case in point: on her first visit to New Zealand my wife encountered cream lamingtons for the first time, and took quite a liking to them.  I haven't seen them here, but then I didn't expect to since they are a distinctly antipodean treat.  (Though I did spot something in the supermarket recently that looked like it might one day evolve into a lamington: a large angel food cake with some kind of pink icing and giant flakes of desiccated coconut attached.)

Nevertheless I thought it would be a simple matter to recreate them, it's just sponge cake, icing and coconut, right?  The icing was no problem, I could make that from scratch, and while finding the right kind of coconut took a little effort I eventually tracked some down at the little Mennonite store we frequent.  But the sponge cake...ah, the sponge cake.

There is no equivalent of Ernest Adams putting out rectangular blocks of sponge cake by the acre.  There might be elsewhere, say in New York, but here in Pennsylvania the closest thing is the angel food cake mentioned above, which is sponge cake, but always comes in a ring which is about the worst shape possible for lamington production.

So I'm forced to make my own square sponge, which means knocking up a few lamingtons for Mrs Walles is a rather more involved process than I'm used to.

Another baking basic I've yet to track down is pure golden syrup.  The best I've found so far is watered down with corn syrup and, while it looks and pours the same, it tastes wrong.  Corn syrup is used a lot here in place of cane sugar as a sweetener because it's cheaper.  It is not, I can assure you, tastier.

Still, I live in hope that I'll stumble across some (probably pricey) golden syrup.  Wikipedia tells me that it's used in Louisiana.  Sounds like a good reason to pay a visit to New Orleans, I reckon.