Skip to main content

And the Competition is on!

Please note - this post is filled with quotation marks (otherwise known as rabbit ears).  Please skip reading this post if rabbit ears offends you.

My Dear Husband requested for a Victoria Sponge Cake for his birthday this year.  Sounds like a simple request, huh?  Problem is, before I met my dear husband, I had never consciously tried a "sponge cake", much less a "Victoria Sponge Cake".  I'm sure I've eaten many a sponge cake, probably disguised as birthday cake or something like that.  But it has never been presented to me as "Sponge Cake" like you would say "Devil's Food Cake" or "Sour Cream Pound Cake". 

And so I went looking for a Sponge Cake recipe.  As with all classic, traditional, well-known and well-loved sweet treats, you can find numerous robust-almost-obsessive discussions on what makes a perfect Sponge Cake, particularly the Victorian Sponge Cake.  The description I like best "A Victoria Sponge is always un-iced, served with just a dusting of icing sugar, neat but never prim".  Neat but never prim - I love it!!!

Apparently, "producing an evenly risen, high Victoria sponge sandwich cake, moist and tender with a buttery flavour and airy lightness, is the ultimate proof of the traditional British cook."  Now, I am neither traditional nor British, but I do love a challenge.

And so, I turn to the British Domestic Goddess - Nigella Lawson - for her Victorian Sponge Cake recipe.  And here is the end product...


Not bad, I thought.  Slightly domed, looked airy, looked buttery, looked moist.  I was pretty pleased with my effort, actually.  Neat, high, not prim.
But, the testing is in the tasting.  So after a tweak in the decorating department by Little Miss M
And after much fanfare...



I ask my "Dear" Husband (notice the quotation marks - yeah...), what does he think of my ta-da "Sponge Cake"?  And the response (as he is smacking his lips together, mind you), "It's certainly buttery".  HUH?!?

"Well, they say that it's difficult to make a really good sponge cake."

HUH?!?  As my chest deflates and my indignation inflates.

"But this is really yum.  The strawberries are really good and I like the cream."

Strawberries that I bought from the shop.  Cream that I just lightly whipped.  What about the cake????

"I just remember it being lighter, that's all."

Aahhh... memories.  When he was a child, my Dear Husband and his family would have a yearly holiday by the beach where they would frolick in the sand (as boys do frolick) and eat Passionfruit Sponge Cake from this one bakery in the area.  So, not only am I trying to measure up to a British National tradition, but I am also competing with childhood memories.

And so, the competition is on!  I'm on the quest for the "perfect" Sponge cake - as defined by my Dear Husband.  Stay tuned.

In the meanwhile, Happy Birthday My Love!!!






Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. SewandthecityAugust 12, 2011 at 7:19 PM

    You post is so funny, vey nice! The cake looks very yummy to me.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's a skill and I need more sleep

Do you tell jokes?  I don't.  Hardly ever anyway.  One - I don't know many jokes. Two - I can't tell jokes.   I stutter the punch lines which ruins it.  Or I'm laughing before I finish telling which, again, ruins it. And three - I have a really BAD sense of humour.    Only my husband gets it.   He gets my humour and reacts.   It's why I married him.     And yes, please note the purposeful use of "reacts" rather than "laugh" because ... yeah ... no ... he doesn't always laugh.  And the times when he does laugh he's usually not laughing at the joke; he's usually laughing at me.   But that's ok because that was the point of the joke - to make him laugh.  Which he does.  Why he's laughing ... well, that's secondary, isn't it? And what about pithy witty comments?   I'm full of them.   Clever, imaginative one-liners.  But, again, it's all in the...
3 comments
Read more

To ice or not to ice?

That is the question... I have a new addiction (surprise, surprise!).  While I still favour Morning Tea and Afternoon Tea and all of its delights, I have recently been replacing the mandatory "tea and cake" with an Iced Tea or an Iced Coffee. These tea delights are so wonderfully refreshing on those hot summer days.  And it satisfies my "drink and sweet" craving in one shot - which saves me on baking time and calorie count (like I do that anyway!). Seriously, I could drink Iced Tea or Iced Coffee all day, but I have limited it to either Morning Tea or Afternoon Tea.  Got to keep it special!  (Hence the continued use of CAPITALS :) ). The best thing is that these drinks are so easy to make at home and, to my taste buds and stomach anyway, are a lot better than most of the ones that you can find in your local cafe.  I can control the strength, the milkiness, the sweetness to suit my picky palate. The other best thing is that I no longer feel the ...
1 comment
Read more

The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days Cupcakes

I have seriously tried to limit the number of cookbooks in my bookshelf.  Not only is the internet a major source of information (and free at that!), but we just don't have the space. However, there are a few cookbooks that I love having on hand, in person, ready to be flicked through at a moments notice.  And this book - the Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days - is fast becoming one of those books.  I love it even more so as it was a "just because" present from my Dear Husband :) The cover is textured and PINK.  Not just a pastel pretty pink, but a bright-in-your-face PINK!!  There's no mistaking the market for this cookbook.  And the rest of the book follows in its bold use of colors.  This cookbook, for me, provides inspiration by way of baking, photography, and food styling.  Much progress on the first one, not so much on the last two.. oh well, so let's talk about the baking. So far, I've tried two basic recipes - the vanilla cupcakes with van...
3 comments
Read more