The Victoria sponge cake, also known as the Victoria sandwich, is one of the UK’s most popular cakes with a layer of jam and buttercream or crème fraîche in the middle.
Due to the fact that I cook a lot in my spare time I recently decided to try Mary’s recipe from BBC Good Food which claims to serve 12 people, takes less than 30 minutes to prepare and up to 30 minutes to cook .
The recipe description reads: “Mary Berry’s easy Victoria sponge cake recipe is a baking classic and a delicious teatime treat. »
To start, I preheated my oven to 180°C or 160°C fan before greasing and filling two 20cm or eight-inch sandwich tins.
Coating the pans is extremely important because it helps them not stick to the bottom, even if you use a loose-bottomed pan.
Ingredients:
For the cake:
– 4 free-range eggs
– 225 g of powdered sugar
– 225g of self-rising flour
– 2 teaspoons of baking powder
– 225g butter at room temperature or spread
Serve:
– Good quality raspberry jam
– Double whipped cream
Method:
The recipe really couldn’t have been easier to follow, with just six steps from start to finish, which took me less than 10 minutes.
To start, I cracked the eggs into a large mixing bowl before adding the sugar, flour, baking powder and butter.
I mixed well with my KitchenAid stand mixer but an electric hand whisk also works just as well, or even a wooden spoon.
It’s important not to overmix the dough, so be sure to stop when there are no more flour lumps in the dough. I then distributed the batter evenly between the pans until it was all used up.
At this point I was worried about how little batter was in each pan, but I made sure to spread it evenly using a palette knife before gently smoothing the surface of the cakes.
The recipe then said to bake the cakes for 25 minutes, checking them after 20 minutes to avoid overcooking them.
My cakes took exactly 25 minutes and I checked with a cake skewer that the middle was done, but it’s important to know your own oven.
I let them cool in their molds for five minutes before running a knife around the edge and turning them out onto a baking rack where they were left to cool completely.
To assemble the cake, I inverted a cake onto a cake board and put lots of jam to cover the layer without getting too close to the edges.
Mary didn’t recommend using a certain amount of jam, so I just used a few tablespoons until I thought there was enough on the cake.
Next, I took 200ml of double cream and whipped it into soft peaks before spreading it lightly over the jam.
I topped this with the second cake, top side up and sprinkled with icing sugar to finish the cake.
This cake tasted absolutely amazing and was the fluffiest and lightest sponge cake recipe I’ve tried thanks to the baking powder. Even though there wasn’t much batter in the pans, the size of the cake was perfect and the layers were the right thickness.
