Coconut cakelets

last time I was in Iceland I was with a Gaelic group and the then mayor of Reykjavik, Jón Gnarr, invited us to his parlour and we had the most delicious little coconut cakey things, very small and dipped in chocolate, they were yummy! I meant to try and find some on this trip, and although I saw a little box of them for some reason my mind was on other things, and I didn’t get them. maybe I should make some? I think they are called kókostoppar, and I think they are quite easy to make as they only have a few ingredients which you just mix together, eggs, sugar, desiccated coconut and some chocolate to melt and dip the cooked cakes in.

When I first went to Manchester as a student there were a lot of very different foods in the shops; one thing which I occasionally treated myself to were deep coconut tarts. They were more like little open pies, deep pastry shells filled with a coconut mixture whichi think was identical to the kókostoppar mixture. I didn’t often have them because I’m sure they were very fattening! … thinking about fattening things to do with coconut, I also remember making coconut ice, which was a popular thing to make and sell for school charity days. Sweetened condensed milk, icing sugar, desiccated coconut… just mix, squidge together, cut into squares and there you are… how delicious and fattening is that? To be exotic we used to colour them with cochineal… weren’t we sophisticated?!