Victoria Sponge Cake

A couple of weeks ago I enjoyed making my first Victoria Sponge Cake. I found it quite easy to make, with some tricky parts.

Making the cake mix and icing:

Ingredients (based on a BBC Good Food recipe):

• 200g caster sugar
• 200g softened butter
• 4 eggs (beaten)
• 200g self-raising flour
• 1Tsp of baking powder

For the filling:

• 100g softened butter
• 140 icing sugar
• Drop of vanilla extract

1. Heat the oven to 180c (our oven gets hot quickly)
2. Mix all of the cake batter ingredients together.
3. Butter two 20cm sandwich tins and line with non-stick baking paper. Make sure the paper is only on the bottom of the tin and doesn’t go up (like mine in the picture).
4. Divide the mixture into two and put into the two tins. Smooth the surface with a spatula or the back of a spoon.
5. Bake in the oven for around 20 minutes. We only did 16 in our hot oven.

 

Building the Victoria Sponge:

The cake springs back under pressure. Leave your Victoria sponge to cool then put your buttercream (see this link for the perfect butter cream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNVPMTWhu3c) in the middle of the cake. Then put jam on the other half of the cake – we used Grandma’s bramble jelly. Then put the cake together and dust some icing sugar on top. If you would like to, you can choose.

The finished product:

In the end, the cake was really delicious. It was quite big, but managed to eat it all because our family are all big foodies!

Our next Victoria Sponge will be upgraded! We need to cup our baking paper properly. We need to do some piping of the butter icing. Also, we need to not open the oven, as the cake did sink a bit.

What do you think?

Freya :0)

Fruit and Nut Cupcakes

This week was my Grandpa’s birthday. We decided to make some cupcakes instead of a normal birthday cake – for a change. They turned out really well and they went down a treat!

The Cupcake Making

We went for fruit and nut cupcakes because we knew our Grandpa would like them. We got the recipe from one of my new bun making books from Christmas, called ‘200 Cupcakes‘ (I would recommend it if you are up for a sweet treat that is simple to make and it delicious).

The ingredients:

• 150g butter;
• 150g light muscavado sugar;
• 200g self-raising flour;
• 3 eggs;
• 2 spoons of almond extract (optional);
• 50g of chopped nuts (you can choose);
• 75g dried fruit (you can choose).

The ingredients are easy to mix and they only take 20 minutes in the oven (you can adjust the time if they do not look cooked). Pop the mix in the moulds and you are ready to put them in the oven. Take a look:

Cherry Buttercream

The cherry buttercream really helps to make the cupcakes nice and moist, with a smooth, sweet flavour.

Buttercream is easy to make. You simply add 150g of butter and twice the amount of caster sugar. Obviously you can double my recipe and make more buns – use your own maths!

If you like a different touch to your simple buttercream, you can add cherry flavouring (which was featured in my brownie recipe – which you can also try – check out the blog I posted last week). This gave the birthday cupcakes a cherry touch, but we also added red food colouring – a few drops – otherwise it will taste really synthetic. My cakes finished up a lovely light-pink.

Birthday Treats

Take a look at the finished product! What do you think of our special candle from Lakeland?