Classic Victoria Sponge

If you're English, it is essential that you know how to make a Victoria Sponge. 

 So I'm going to tell you how because it's so easy. This is for a 9 inch one.

12oz - Marg - room temp

120z - Caster Sugar

12oz - SR Flour

1tsp - Baking Powder

6 - Eggs

2 tsp - Vanilla Essence 

Step 1. Bung it all in a mixer and mix

Step 2. Divide up between the 2 tins and put them in the oven on 180 for 25-35mins

Step 3. Make some butter cream. Put soft butter in a bowl (maybe half a pack) beat it and then keep adding icing sugar until is stops tasting like butter. Add some vanilla essence too.

Step 4. When the sponges are cool, smoother one half in strawberry or raspberry jam and one side with butter cream.

Step 5. Say a little prayer and then flip the jam coated one on top of the other one

Step 5. Dust with icing or caster sugar (I like putting a doily on top and making a pretty pattern)

Step 6. Put the kettle on and eat a slice with a cup of tea and a friend

Challenge #9 Coffee & Walnut Tray Bake

It's been a while since I've done a recipe out of the Mary Berry Baking Bible (http://danngoodcake.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-mary-berry-baking-challenge-1-lemon.html)  but here's a tray bake I made the other day. I loooove coffee cake, even though I hate coffee as a drink.

It's a great 'throw it all in the mixer' recipe and comes out lovely and moist. Yum.

The icing is also very tasty and easy to make - it has a lot of icing sugar compared to butter (more than usual) so be prepared for an icing sugar explosion from the mixer!.

Mary Berry tops hers with walnut halves but I had run out. Luckily I happened to have some chocolate sauce left over from pancake day so used that instead. 

My parents came to stay the following weekend and coffee cake was requested so I used the same recipe but made them into cupcakes.

Paprika & Cheese Scones

Cheese scones are one of my all time favourite goodies that Mum used to (and still does) make. I haven't had them for yeeeears so it was about time to bake some. 

I used the BBC Good Food cheese scone recipe which is: (I actually doubled it as I wanted big scones)

225g SR flour, pinch salt, 55g butter, 25g grated cheddar, 150ml milk

I topped them with paprika and parmesan. I came across this idea when hunting the internet for different types of savoury scones and thought it would work with the cheese.

So once you've cut out the scones, instead of brushing the tops with egg I made a mixture of 2tbsp melted butter & 2tsp of paprika slopped it on and sprinkled with parmesan.

They went in the oven on 220 degrees C for about 15ish mins.

Bingo!

Multicoloured Macarons

So I've always avoided making Macarons because they look so faffy.

But yesterday I stumbled upon a recipe that had lots of reviews saying how easy they were to make. So I went for it. I even coloured them (that seems to be the 'in' thing to do).

The result - they don't look as perfect & smooth as they do on the recipe's photo, but they taste gooooood and went down very well at work. I'm not a huge fan of the multi-colouredness either, plus I didn't choose the nicest of colour combinations - purple & orange (complimentary on paper but not in food).

Always fun to experiment though.

I got the recipe from here http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/multicoloured-macaroons