Victoria Sponge Cake and Spiced Victoria Sponge Cake

No birthday party is complete without a cake. I gamely volunteered to make one and by volunteered, I mean insisted. It seemed only right and proper that I should choose one from the Sandwich Cakes chapter of Good Housekeeping’s Picture Cake Making (Waverley, 1955) but as I realised I hadn’t baked a sponge cake for atleast a year, something simple would be advisable.

As we had a range of guests attending. I decided to make a two sorts of cake based around the same recipe – a classic Victoria sponge and a spiced Victoria sponge.

Notes

• Good lord, the icing took a lot of heating before it thickened – I would estimate an hour, no joke. When it had thickened however, it was very easy to spread. I used mostly basic dark chocolate and a little bit of Green & Blacks Maya Gold. (Thanks for the birthday present of the sugar letters. You know who you are.)
• Small disaster – my spring-sided cake tin leaked slightly so the bottom layer was slightly thinner than I intended (and I had to remove a  crispy layer of cake from the bottom of my oven. Thank God my oven is self-cleaning, it just peeled away.)

Results

For reasons I can’t quite fathom, the spice cake was lighter than the vanilla layer, although both were complimented for their moistness. Following the recipe exactly meant not doing any of the tricks I would normally use to make the sponge as  light as possible  (such as swapping a dessert spoon of the sugar for golden syrup or a heaped teaspoon of  the wheat flour for corn flour). It wasn’t a bad effort though and certainly, a fair amount was eaten on the spot despite how well we had all laid into the other dishes. The icing had an amazing  texture and flavour – definitely worth the time.

Caked by Elly

CHOCOLATE MOUSSE

was idly flipping through “beginner’s cookery” (Betty Falk, revised Penguin edition ‘73, original ‘64 – can any people tell me the appropriate citation when a publication has repeat editions? I should know this…), after a rough day at work and feeling like something simple… when I found… chocolate mousse! mousse?! no-one can make mousse at home! what is this doing in ‘beginner’s cookery’! How ridiculous! Yes, that’s what I thought too – but there’s only two essential ingredients and one optional one – and the optional one is BOOZE? And I do happen to have a bar of 70% Green and Blacks in the cupboard… how hard can it be!

I blame Terroirs. Terroirs is a wonderful wine bar near Charing Cross station with an extremely extensive wine list that I do not understand, a charcuterie selection and some extremely amazing anchovies, shaped into a an octopus. Incredible. I’ve had it twice. The salt… the salt. Anyway… for afters, they do a bitter chocolate pot, which is fantastic. I wanted to make something just like it. So how did that work out?

INGREDIENTS
3oz good cooking chocolate (I used 70% G&B and this is about 3/4 a bar)
3 eggs (I used 2 large eggs – because I only had 2 eggs, for goodness sake)
1 tbsp RHUM (optional)

HOWTO
1. break chocolate into small bits. melt chocolate in a bain marie. (= a basin over a saucepan of boiling water. the original instructions say you can also use a double saucepan. I have never SEEN a double saucepan EVER in my LIFE and assume you haven’t either. I saw an American recipe book which called for a double BROILER. Even more ridiculous! I digress…)

2. Break the eggs into two bowls, separating whites from yolks.

3. whisk whites of egg stiffly. they should be still enough to hold any shape you push them into. (or use the traditional, yet scarier, bowl upside down over head test. fun!)

IMPORTANT #3b – if you want to add some RHUM, add it here!!

4. remove chocolate from heat and stir in yolks with wooden spoon

5. gently FOLD whites into chocolate mixture until it is well mixed.

6. pour into dishes and serve as cold as possible.

NOTES

- the recipe doesn’t involve my extra 3b. hence my addition. grr! i hate recipes that do this.
- as i missed the rum, i decided to ‘pair’ the mousse with a mug of frangelico.
- a… mistake?
- i didn’t fold the egg whites in very well. they weren’t blending together, and it’s a small amount in a shallow pan so all quite difficult.
- lots of lumps of chocolate left. perhaps i didn’t melt it enough, or it started coalescing during the mixing. still delicious though – actually quite nice to have the airy bits and the chocolate lumpy bits together.
- chocolate mousse pictured with chocolate dogs (!) on the cover of ‘ami ami dogs’ by mitsuki hoshi <3

WORTH THE WASHING UP?

dishes used: 1x pyrex bain marie, 1x bowl in which to mix egg whites, 2x ramekins for serving.
worth it? ABSOLUTELY! it's not even washing up when you get to lick the bowl.
marks out of ten: 10/10!

I will absolutely be making this again – using a smaller dish and perhaps the pink spatula thingie and try this folding in in a more *~delicate~* manner and see if I can get it any lighter. I wonder what it would be like with G&B 85%. Oh my…

Pavé au Chocolat

In which I raid Anne Seranne again and make what it basically a tiramisu but with chocolate instead of cream and filter coffee and cognac, instead of espresso and marsala. This is from chapter 4, ‘Cornstarch, rice, farina, and other creamy desserts’ from The Complete Book of Desserts (1952, Faber and Faber for the Cookery Book Club).

Pavé au Chocolat (Blender method)

6oz semi-sweet chocolate, broken into pieces
¼ cup boiling water or strong coffee
4 egg yolks
½ cup soft butter [this is translated at the front of the book as 4oz]
4 tablespoons cognac
½ cup cold water
5oz lady-fingers
Whipped cream

Into container of an electric blender put chocolate pieces and boiling liquid.

Cover and blend on a high speed for about 10 seconds, or until sauce is smooth.

Remove cover and add egg yolk and butter and continue to blend until smooth, stopping it stir down if necessary.

Empty chocolate cream into a bowl.

Add half the cognac to the container, cover, and blend for a few seconds.

Add to the chocolate cream and mix.

Combine remaining cognac and cold water.

Line bottom of a spring-form pan with waxed paper. Dip lady-fingers, one at a time, into the diluted cognac ands arrange a layer of lady-fingers in pan. Spread with a layer of chocolate cream, using about half the cream. Arrange another layer of lady-fingers and top with the remaining chocolate cream. Cover with lady-fingers and chill for atleast 2 hours.

To serve: run knife around sides of pan and invert dessert. Discard waxed paper and decorate with rosettes of whipped cream. Serves 8.

Notes

• This was very simple and would certainly be do-able for those without a blender, simply by melting the broken chocolate in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and placing it on a firm surface and indulging in some vigorous stirring.
• I used a silicon loaf tin, lined as suggested, as my spring-form tin didn’t seem to be a suitable size.
• No rosette piping for me – I just served the whipped cream in a bowl

Results

Results

This was incredibly rich but the flavour wasn’t quite right, somehow. I used filter coffee and admittedly not particularly great booze but when I make this again, I might leave the coffee out and use amaretto or rum instead. I also wondered if there is a better biscuit than sponge fingers, they lighten the pudding but seem to be too much of a contrast – maybe amaretti would be better, maybe these?

It looked OK, far from elegant, perhaps making it in a round container would improve the appearance. I cut the remainder into slices and froze them and can confirm that this has done it no harm at all.

Custard Creams

Cream-filled biscuits seem to have dropped out of UK baking fashion in favour of American-style cookies, healthy things containing grated apple or dead easy things like flapjack (nice though all those can be).  The Good Housekeeping Institute’s Cookery Compendium (Waverly, 1955), however, is full of biscuits of every kind, from things like this (pretty much) and this to custard creams! I thought custard creams were dreamed up by some marketing person in, well, the past and I was basically right.  They were a late 19^th century invention, probably by Huntley & Palmers of Reading, probably to capitalise on the new popularity of custard powder. (More info here.)

They’re still the most popular biscuit in the UK and in one of her recent publications, a certain camera-friendly Brunette cook gave a recipe for heart-shaped ones saying the it was “hitherto… only known in its packet form”. Ha! GHI got there first, missus, and armed with a 7p packet of economy custard powder, a teeny bar of Green and Blacks and some coffee essence, I shall recreate this national favourite in my own kitchen.

Custard Creams

4 oz margarine
4 oz sugar
1 egg yolk
4 oz custard powder
4 oz flour
Vanilla essence
A little milk
Butter icing

Cream the fat and sugar and beat in the egg yolk. Add the custard powder, flour and a few drops of vanilla essence and sufficient cold milk to give a dough.  Roll out thinly, prick all over and cut into squares, fingers or rounds. Bake on a greased tin in a moderate oven (375C) for about 15 minutes until very lightly coloured. Cool on a wire tray.

When the biscuits are quite cold, sandwich them together in pairs with butter icing, either plain or flavoured with coffee essence or chocolate. Serve with sieved icing sugar dredged over the top.

Chocolate Butter Icing

2 oz butter or margarine
3 oz icing sugar
A little vanilla essence
1 oz block [sic] chocolate

Cream the fat, then add the sieved sugar a little at a time, and blend together. Add a few drops of vanilla essence, and lastly mix in the melted chocolate.

Coffee Butter Icing

Use the above recipe [Vanilla buttercream: 3 oz butter or margarine, 4oz icing sugar, vanilla essence, colouring, if required], beating in coffee essence to taste.

Notes

• I halved the recipe.
• I used margarine in the biscuits and butter in the icing.
• As with the golf biscuits (and again, probably because of the margarine), it didn’t need any milk. I mixed it into perfect dough, felt like I might be cheating as I hadn’t added any milk, added a teaspoon and regretted it when it instantly became too sticky and needed lots of flour when rolling out. Maybe this is a difference between margarine at the time of writing and today? Margaret Thatcher worked out how to get more air into icecream when she was a scientist. Perhaps there is more water in marg these days? Anyway, in the future if I am instructed to ‘add sufficient milk to give a dough’ and sufficient milk is no milk at all, I shall add none.
• Again this recipe doesn’t say how widely spaced the biscuits should be on the tray, nor how many this dough should produce – not good for learners, GHI!

Results

The uncooked dough smelt and tasted exactly like shop-bought custard cream biscuit. (What!? Uncooked dough sampling is an important part of trying a new recipe.) The batch I made produced 18 biscuits, 2 – 3 inches across. I don’t own a plain round cutter and the crimped edges spread messily. (As the dough was quite soft, I didn’t want to risk using an empty jar to cut them out.) I made 2 small batches of buttercream icing – one chocolate, one coffee. I didn’t ice all the biscuits, but kept some plain stored in an airtight tin and the icing in the fridge, so they could be iced as necessary to avoid going soggy. Both stayed fresh for a week.

After baking however they were quite different to the commercial version. The vanilla flavour is quite pronounced (of course) and the texture was unlike any biscuit I’ve made before – both light and slightly chewy.  (I imagine the lightness is caused by lower gluten content.) This wasn’t what I expected – I expected something like shortcake. They went from chewy to positively bendy 6 hours after baking. (Really, I could bend them,  I can’t believe I didn’t take a photo of this.) By the following day, they had crisped up completely and the icing was a good contrast to this.

They were as rich and sweet as you would imagine, I think with vanilla buttercream they would have been inedible – I liked the coffee and chocolate iced versions equally. If I made them again, I would add some spice to the dough and some booze to the icing. This biscuit reminded me most of all why I bake at home – there is simply nothing like this that one could buy.

Chocolate-Cheese Fudge Cake

Back in April, you might remember Alix and I hijacked Chris and Vicky’s bbq with a vintage bake-off. I took along this lemon butter cake which turned out going down well. However, I didn’t feel confident whilst the cake was cooling so I made a second cake – three columns along from the other one so another from “Female Cookbook 1978″.

INGREDIENTS

125g (4oz) butter
125g (4oz) processed cream cheese
1 cup caster sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 cup chopped walnuts
85g (2.5oz) Van Houten cocoa
300g self raising flour
0.25 tsp bicarbonate of sofa
0.25 tsp salt
1 cup sour milk
whipped cream

Method
To make frosting – heat 1/2 cup cream with 60g (1oz) butter until the latter has melted. Remove from heat. Gradually add 3.5 cups sifted icing sugar and 0.25tsp salt. Add 85g (2.5oz) melted Windmolen cooking chocolate and 1tsp vanilla essence. Beat all together over ice until thickened to spreading consistency.

For the cake – Cream butter and cream cheese with brown and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in walnuts. Fold in sifted flour, cocoa, bicarbonate of sofa and salt alternately with sour milk. Fill into well-greased and lightly floured 20cm (8in) sandwich tins. Bake in a moderate oven for 45 mins. Turn out onto cake cooler and when cool, sandwich cake with sufficient stiffly whipped cream and cover with frosting.

The result

Notes

- no walnuts, I *think* I used hazelnuts instead.
- I loathe cream so didn’t bother with the frosting at all. I do hate recipes which don’t list all the ingredients at the start and run the risk of leaving you in the lurch when you get into the ‘guts’ of the recipe.
- Van Houten cocoa (and Windmolen chocolate for that matter) – this is like when American chocolate cake recipes harp on about “dutch processed cocoa”, whatever that is. Don’t worry yourselves, I always use ‘regular’ cocoa and it’s fine. I can’t think if I’ve ever even seen specific Dutch cocoa, even in Waitrose ponce section full of Charbonnel & Walker…
- did I mention I hated cream? I sandwiched these together with a basic cream cheese icing rather than cream.
- How to sour milk= tip a tablespoon of vinegar in it (I use rice vinegar – I think most people use cider vinegar. I’ve used rice vinegar mostly because I generally have some. I did invest in cider vinegar a while ago and I actually didn’t like it as much in it’s role as curdler).

Conclusion

This makes a large cake when both parts wedged together. I felt like the lemon cake I made earlier hadn’t risen enough and was too flat, and this chocolate cake went the other way! I still feel like I’m yet to find the happy medium – am sure this doesn’t happen when making Victoria sponges. Or perhaps it does? I really enjoyed the anarchy~ of mixing butter and cream cheese to start! I don’t think I’ve ever done this before and it made the cake kinda crumbly.I stuck with the cream cheese theme by making a cream cheese icing but perhaps this would have been better if I’d just gone the whole hog and made a chocolate filling? Or maybe orange – there’s an orange cream filling in the cake recipe immediately proceeding this one. Oh for goodness sakes, I must cook something other than cake sometime… let me just recover from the indie flu and I’ll see what I can do. Ehhh. Why didn’t this auto publish when it was supposed to~

Chocolate Cinnamon Gâteau

This one’s from Cooking With Herbs and Spices by Josceline Dimbleby, published in 1979.  As David Dimbleby’s first wife this book is an intriguing insight into the bizarre eating habits of the rich and famous. Only kidding, it’s a collection of dubious seventies dishes, including Surprise Meatballs – “I love meatballs and there seem to be endless variations to try out. My husband suggested stuffing them with a nugget of cheese…” (It is my experience that if a dish has the word ’surprise’ in the title then the surprise is very likely to be cheese*). But I wasn’t looking for savoury cheesy treats, but cake recipes, and went for this sumptuous sounding one.

Chocolate Cinnamon Gâteau

(Josceline writes) This is my idea of a perfect chocolate cake: moist, rich and gooey, covered with whipping cream and trickles of melted chocolate. It is much more of a pudding than a cake and always seems to disappear quickly.

5oz plain chocolate

6 tablespoons water

4oz butter or margarine

5oz soft brown sugar

3 large eggs, separated

2oz ground almonds

2oz fresh white breadcrumbs

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Apricot jam

1/4 pint double or whipping cream

Grease a fairly shallow 7-8 inch cake tin and line with a disc of greaseproof paper. Melt 4oz of the chocolate in the water and stir until smooth. Leave to cool slightly.

Beat the butter until soft. Add the brown sugar and beat until fluffy. Beat in the egg yolks, followed by the ground almonds and the melted chocolate. Stir in the breadcrumbs and cinnamon.

Heat the oven to Gas Mark 5/ 375°F/190°C. Whisk the egg whites until they stand up in soft peaks. Then using a metal spoon, fold them gently into the chocolate mixture and spoon evenly into the prepared cake tin. Bake in the centre of the oven for 40-50 minutes, until springy to a touch in the centre. Cool completely in the tin.

When cool, loosen the edges with a knife and turn out. Melt the remaining chocolate with 1 tablespoon of water. Stir until smooth and leave to cool. Put the cake on a serving plate and spread all over with apricot jam. Whisk the cream until thick and with it first ice the sides and then the top of the cake in rough flicks. Then holding the spoon high over the cake, trickle the cooled chocolate over it in thin criss-cross patterns.  Leave in a very cool place, preferably not the fridge, until ready to serve.

Results

Observations

• This would be an irritating cake to make without a food mixer. I feel I am not being particulary authentic when I reach for the Kenwood but on the other hand I cannot be bothered doing these things by hand.
• It’s a vaguely fiddly process, what with the melting chocolate, and the fact that I had to make the breadcrumbs (I decided the violent orange shopbought breadcrumbs from the Welsh Eggs would not be ok in a cake)
• Everything went well until icing. Like a fool I didn’t let the cake cool completely and the cream went a bit funny first time round so I scraped it off and started again, after putting the cake in the fridge for a half hour, which apparently wasn’t enough as the cream did the same thing again. This time I’d run out of cream and left it as it was, deciding that it was only funny looking, not funny tasting.
• I right messed up drizzling the chocolate over the top. I was tired by this point and should have made more of an effort. It looked more Pollock gone rogue than a ‘thin criss-cross pattern’. You can’t tell from the picture, but out of shot are many lakes of melted chocolate. Ah well.

Conclusion

This cake is delicious, and I intend to make it again, definitely. The slight tediousness of the recipe (and it is slight) is well worth the moist, rich, wonderfully textured cake. The ground almonds work very well, though I have to say the cinnamon is mild, but it works too.

*the exception being in vegetarian dishes where the surprise is usually sausages.

Chequerboard Cake

This recipes comes from a box of recipe cards I got from a charity shop in Camden for £3 called Alison Burt’s Super Saving Cookery Cards, published by Hamlyn in 1975. I was in two minds about buying them as I’d been at the car boot previously and had a lot to carry home already. But, heck, I’m glad I made the effort, as they’re kind of amazing. It’s a collection of around 200 cards, divided into categories like Budget Entertaining, Oriental Cookery, Scones and Teabreads, Ice Cream Desserts. The recipes are mainly quite sensible but some of them are wonderfully tacky in a vaguely Abigail’s Party way (Kipper Pizza, anyone?), and all of them are depicted on the front of the recipe card with a picture, occasionally featuring some odd set dressing (Dutch macaroons are displayed in tiny ceramic clogs and arranged around a windmill). I haven’t found much online about Alison Burt – Alibris have a few cookery titles by someone of the same name, looks like she did a few cookery titles. There’s enough intriguing recipes in this box to keep anyone going for a lifetime, but I decided to make something from the Special Cakes section:

Chequerboard Cake

100g margarine

100g castor sugar

2 eggs, beaten

100g self-raising flour

1 level tablespoon cocoa, sifted

1 tablespoon milk

3 tablespoons raspberry jam, sieved

Icing:

50g plain chocolate

75g margarine

150g icing sugar

angelica for decoration

Grease 2 7inch round shallow cake tins and line the bases with greased greaseproof paper. Cream the margarine and castor sugar until light and fluffy. Gradually add the eggs, beating well after each addition. Sift in the flour and fold in with a tablespoon. Divide the mixture in half. Add cocoa and milk to one half. Put one mixture in each tin. Bake in a moderate oven (350F, 180C, Mark 4) for 20-25 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Cut a 5 inch round from the centre of each cake. Cut a 3 inch round from the centre of the small rounds. Transfer the 5 inch chocolate ring to the plain cake and the plain one to the chocolate cake. Reassemble both cakes, sticking them together with raspberry jam. Sandwich the cakes with more raspberry jam. Make the icing. Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of hot water. Cool. Beat the margarine and sifted icing sugar. Add the chocolate. Decorate as illustrated.

Results

Notes

• OK, so the amounts specified in no way yield the size of cake this is supposed to make. I got two sponge disks which were about half an inch thick. Working on the assumption that the cake shown in the picture is 7″ in diameter I estimate its depth at around 2.5-3″. Mine was around 1″ tall, and as you can see, hardly looks like the picture. Good thing I have no pretence of professionalism, or I’d have to contact Cake Wrecks and confess.
• I used water instead of milk.
• I used a martini glass, and a small wine glass to cut the circles from the cakes. This worked ok as the sponge was thin but I’m not sure how I would have done it neatly with a thicker cake to cut.
• I stupidly forgot to jam the pieces together. I’m a seasoned warmer of jam, and was quite looking forward to heating up some jam for gluing, but totally forgot this step. I’m not sure it would have worked that well anyway, as the sponge was very crumbly.
• I substituted cocoa for the plain chocolate in the icing as I had accidentally eaten the chocolate I bought for this purpose, only minutes before. Oops.
• I always get icing wrong, so I went a bit ‘off-recipe’ with the quantities here. I am not convinced by margarine in icing though.
• I tried to ‘decorate as illustrated’ but 1) I do not have a piping bag, and 2) it’s rather hard to do anything with a cake that’s just an inch high.
• I am not sure where the angelica was supposed to go. Whatever, I had none anyway.

Conclusion

This cake could be really excellent with a few tweaks – an easy way to make something that looks kind of impressive. HOWEVER this recipe is screwed – double the quantities (at least) for the sponge and then maybe you’ll be onto something. Some flavouring could be good too – chocolate cake is lovely, but this is a marg heavy cake and some mint or citrus tones could help even things out. It tasted very average, and I am not exactly excited about eating the rest.

Iced by Alix