Saturday, 2 June 2012

Number Fourteen: Victoria Sponge

The pub across the road from me is having a bake-off to celebrate the Jubilee! All the cakes entered will be judged by a panel, and the winner gets a bottle of champagne. The cakes will then be sold in aid of Help for Heroes. I don't care much for champagne, but I want to enter anyway because I LOVE baking! And it's for a good cause too :) Besides, if I do by any chance win, my dad has said that he will gladly take the champagne off my hands. Sorted.

Briefly, this is my idea:

A 3 layer sponge cake, filled with jam, iced all over, berries stuck around the sides, with a corgi face iced on the top. Accompanying the cake - six corgi 'pup'cakes.

I thought a victoria sponge mix would be good for this - light and fluffy, but able to withstand being iced and adorned with a corgi etc etc. Since I'm doing this challenge it made sense to use Nigella's victoria sponge recipe!

The recipe below is the one given in 'How to be a Domestic Goddess', and it's enough to fill two 21cm sandwich tins. However I doubled the quantities as I needed to fill three tins, AND have enough left to make some pupcakes.

It's such an easy way of making a cake - you literally just bung everything in the food processor! Nigella also gives instructions for the traditional method of mixing up a cake, but I used the processor method, so that's what I'm putting on here.

Here it is:


Ingredients:

225g unsalted butter, very soft (I actually always use margarine instead of butter, as I think it makes for a lighter cake, but do as you please)
225g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 large eggs
200g self raising flour
25g cornflour (If you don't have any, just use 225g of self raising flour, but the cornflour helps to make the cake lighter)
1 tsp baking powder
3-4 tablespoons milk


Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180C (160C in a fan oven.) Nigella says that if your tins are loose-bottomed, you don't need to line them. But I still did - I don't trust my tins. They've ruined many a birthday cake un-lined, so lined they shall be.




2. Now for the easy bit. Chuck everything, except the milk, in the food processor.


Your's won't be quite this full - I did double the mix, remember?

3. Mix until you have a smooth batter. Then add the milk gradually through the funnel until the cake is a soft dropping consistency. I only needed about 3 tbsp of the milk - it goes runnier in the processor for some reason.




4. Divide the batter between your tins, and bake for 20 - 25 minutes, until beginning to come away from the edges, springy to the touch, and a skewer inserted comes out clean. I say 20 to 25 as I have a fan oven, so they only needed about 20, but they might need the full 25 in a conventional oven.




And that's it! Here they are, fresh from the oven :D




This is where I stop following the recipe. To do it Nigella's way, fill with jam, berries and whipped cream, and sprinkle with caster sugar. I, however, have a corgi cake to make. I will keep you updated on that - hope I don't have too 'ruff' a time of it. Oh ha ha.

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