The Victory Sponge in all its glory!
A Taste of Cumbria received a picture via Twitter last week of a homemade Victoria sponge from Scott McLoughlin. Scott is a very good friend and is a novice baker. As you can see and will read in his guest blog for A Taste of Cumbria, his Victoria sponge flourished! Although, he says modestly says this happened ‘against the odds’, I believe his first attempt should be congratulated. Has he unearthed a secret talent for baking? Read on for his witty Victoria sponge adventure…
(On an aside note, please do send me your cooking and baking pictures! You can even guest blog for me and describe your cooking experiences. Leave a comment here, message our facebook page or tweet)
This Mother’s Day I decided I’d try and do something a little different, whilst challenging myself in the process. I decided to try baking. After all every mum loves a cake, and good mums like anything that their kids do, no matter how badly they do it.
Luckily, I’m blessed with a great mum with fantastic patience, despite having been tormented for 23 years with shitey crayon drawings and bad jokes. Surely, she’d love a cake to celebrate the completely non-corporate festivities of Mother’s Day – no matter how woefully un-cake-like it could turn out?
So it was decided. I shall bake! And that is what I did.
The only real problem was, I’ve never really baked, well not solo anyway. I think my lack of baking to date is down to the fact that I’m quite choosey when it comes to the cakes I like. I have a pretty rigid idea of what I think constitutes a cake. Also there are a number of luscious cake varieties I just don’t think I could stomach, let alone bake. For these reasons I decided to avoid the Mother’s Day cliché of chocolate, and bake a Victoria sponge – but give it a unique and personal twist. This cake I would later dub, ‘The Victory Sponge!’ A cake baked against the odds.
A three layered Victoria sponge with strawberries and blackberries
The Recipe: I actually stayed fairly loyal to the Victoria Sponge recipe I sourced on the BBC Food website Well, I say I stayed loyal, loyal in the first instance anyway… excluding cock-ups. I followed the recipe and directions to bake the sponge element of the cake, then I went off-road. I guess this makes me some sort of a cake maverick.
My method for Baking a Victory Sponge!
1) Put on the Atoms for Peace’s debut album ‘Amok’, loud.
2) Measure out the ingredients.
3) Add the margarine to sugar.
4) Add the Flour, the Eggs, and the vanilla extract to the sugary marge puddle you just made.
5) Stir, whisk, beat the mixture until you get arm ache – because baking is strangely physical.
6) Go out for 3 hours…Wait a minute. What?
7) Come back home after a wander around aimlessly until remembering you’re actually supposed to be baking.
8) Re-pre-heat oven.
9) Dollop the mix into two cake tins. Cook for 28mins at 180C because you can’t wait two minutes longer.
10) Place your awesome cake on a cooling rack, and marvel because you haven’t re-baked ‘Grey Cake’ – that tasteless cakey sensation you baked with your younger brother when you were 14.
11) Then shut your laptop, hiding BBC food. Fasten your seatbelt, tighten your jam roll cage, and switch to 4×4 mode. It’s time to go off the rocky road. (Terrible cake jokes)
12) Cut the two cake bases in half – providing 4 layers of cake, not a simple sandwich cake like the BBC website wants you to have. You’re a rebel!
13) Consult your Mum because you’re not that much of a rebel, and you’ve got lost in the perils of the cakey outback after going off-road without a map.
14) Bin the intended 4th layer of cake because it doesn’t look to have cooked as well as the other 3 – you’ve still got a double sponge sandwich on your hands, so you’re also still a rebel. Pow! Take that Merry Berry.
15) Prepare fresh strawberries (which you lightly sugar), and blackberries that you hope are both tart and tangy.
16) Add clotted cream to the bottom 2 layers (because you want this to taste like a giant mega scone), and seedless jam to the underside of the 2 top layers.
17) Decorate and fill the bottom sandwich with strawberries, and the top sandwich with blackberries.
A nicely baked sponge with no soggy bottoms!
18) Place on a square plate even though the cake is circular because you’re edgy.
19) Pre-maturely tweet a picture of the cake because you’re super proud it looks like a cake and not an undercooked yet fruity pile of vom. Feel your heart sink as a friend informs you it looks like a Big Mac.
A Big Mac..? I think not!
20) Cry when another chimes in asking, “do you want fries with that?”
Feel renewed hope when you are informed you forgot to frost the cake.Add the missing frosting, and once again feel the biz.
Lightly dusted with icing sugar and ready to eat with a brew!
Tasting and serving the cake: I went with a sideplate full of cake, with extra fruit and a pot of tea for good measure. Oooh yeahhhh. You’ve arrived at the taste party.
Did it taste good? Well there wasn’t any left. So either it was unbelievably good, or my mum once again proved she is a lovely, lovely person, willing to eat cakey nonsense to see me smile.
You can read more from Scott (but probably not about baking) on themisadventuresofscott.blogspot.co.uk
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