I felt like doing a bit of baking and found this recipe for a classic Victoria Sponge. I know I said I had sworn off the BBC’s GoodFood site, but there are such good finds on there, I can’t help myself.

Anyway, the thing I particularly love about making a sponge is that you just throw all the ingredients in together and mix it up.

Mix, mix, mix.

I even bought my first set of cake tins for this. I’ve baked cakes before, but never really invested in the whole layering thing, so it was fun to own two little tins.

Wasn’t 100% sure on the baking paper business, as I’ve not used it before, and it seemed over the top when the cake tins were non-stick too. I was prepared to give it a go and blame the recipe when it went wrong…

…but it didn’t! The cakes didn’t stick to the paper and the paper didn’t stick to the pans. It did leave a not-so-neat edge around the cakes but I suspect that is entirely user error.

You can see that one bit was too hot and one bit was not as hot as the rest, but they were all cooked completely without burning, so I was happy.

Thus to the icing.

Sugar and butter beaten together to make butter cream. Mr C arrived home at this point, and I literally had to wrestle the bowl of butter cream out of his hands. He reckons he can eat a bowl full as a meal. Weird.

All that was left was to wait for the cake to cool, layer it up, et voilà!

As with most of my attempts at cooking, it didn’t look all that presentable, but it tasted really good. The cake was not too dry, not too wet, and the butter cream… what was left of it… sealed the whole thing off beautifully.

Really happy with how this turned out.