Chocolate coconut slice

Coconut slice

This recipe is in my mother's recipe book, titled "The best thing to come out of a terrible coffee morning". My mother was a suburban housewife in the 1950s, and didn't like it much. Her recipe specified marge - I've used butter.

Ingredients
butter
sugar
dessicated coconut
plain flour
cocoa
Icing:
icing sugar
cocoa
1/4 tsp instant coffee

Equipment

bowl
spoon
food mixer
tin

oven:
time in oven: 30 mins

preparation time:
cream butter and sugar
mix rest of ingredients
(afterwards) make icing

Cooking process

Cream butter and sugar. Mix in rest of ingredients.
Put mixture in tin and press down well. Put in oven and cook for 30 mins.
Beat icing sugar, cocoa and a little instant coffee with 2 tablespoons of hot water. Pour onto the coconut mix while still warm.
When cool and set, cut into slices.

Other comments

The original recipe used weights for some measurements and cups for others. I'm not sure where the recipe came from!
I couldn't be bothered to cream the butter and sugar, so ended up rubbing the fat in. It seemed to work.
Also, I didn't have cocoa, so used hot chocolate powder instead. As this is a mixture of cocoa and sugar, I use more of that, and less sugar.
Also, I didn't have icing sugar, so use granulated sugar, and twice the amount of water, and heated it in a saucepan. Probably didn't need to use twice the amount of water (which I did because I assumed some would be driven off as steam). The icing ended up fairly liquid.
Also, I didn't line the tin, and iced it in the tin, which should have lead to problems getting it out. But I cut it in half length-ways, and managed to prise it out with only one break.
It's quite a forgiving recipe!