Belizean Stewed Beans, Coconut Rice and Chocolate Cake

Daaaaamn! This was so delicious! I've never had authentic Belizean food before but I wanted to give it a try when I learned that they use coconut milk in a lot of their dishes. My kinda food, I said! I looked up a lot of recipes online and kept coming across "Rice and Beans" so many times. In that recipe, the beans are cooked together with the coconut milk and rice. I decided to do it seperately by pre-cooking my kidney beans in a crockpot the day before and then today sauteeing onions, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper then adding the beans (with the broth it was cooked in) and the coconut milk and letting it stew for about a half hour. Wonderful on top of coconut rice and with a side of fried plantains and coleslaw. Here is the beans recipe that I worked from. I omitted the pig tail for obvious reasons.

Coconut Rice recipe
(I don't know where I got this recipe. I wrote it out on a piece of paper and failed to note where it came from!)

2 cups water
1 cup basmati rice
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup coconut milk
cinnamon stick

Rinse rice if you want (I did not.). Bring water to a boil in a saucepan. Stir in rice, salt, coconut milk and cinnamon stick and bring to a boil again. Lower heat and cover for 30 minutes. Remove cinnamon stick and fluff rice with fork before serving.


For desert I continued with the use of coconut milk by adding it to this basic chocolate cake. I think it would have tasted more like coconut if I hadn't poured the rich chocolate ganache over it! Oh well, it was still very very moist, just very chocolatey.


Vic from The Life blog inspired me to make this cake when I saw a photo of his crazy delicious looking cake. Thanks Vic!