We have been celebrating the twins' birthday over the weekend and they choose, baked, designed and decorated their own birthday cakes. This one was loosely based on a Victoria sponge cake recipe. It turned out to be very light and delicious.
A classic Victoria sponge cake repurposed as a birthday cake - very tasty and a really nice change from chocolate cake.
Pre heat the oven to 170c/325f
Add all the sponge ingredients into a large mixing bowl and mix well. Don't worry if there are a few small lumps of butter, they melt in the oven and don't seem to cause a problem. You could do this in one of those electric mixers if you have one, we don't so elbow grease is the order of the day...
Grease and line with baking parchment two cake tins and divide the mixture equally between them. Hint - tap the tins on the work surface to make sure it spreads to the sides and is smooth on top
Place in the pre-heated oven for 25-30 minutes. You can tell it's cooked by lightly touching the centre which should bounce back
Once cooked, remove from the oven, take the cake out of the tin and place on a wire rack to cool
When the cake is cooled, spread the top of one with the mascarpone and the other with the jam and then place the two pieces together to make a sandwich
To make the icing, sieve the icing sugar into a bowl and add a little food colouring and cold water. Stir together and add more water a little at a time until the icing is slowly dropping off the spoon. If you add too much water just sieve in a little more icing sugar until the consistency is right. If it's too runny it'll run down the sides of the cake and will make icing more difficult
We decided to have a football pitch on our cake that we drew with writing icing once the green icing had hardened. You can choose whatever colour icing and decorations to put on top
As with the chocolate birthday cake recipe, the children did almost everything for this Victoria sponge birthday cake recipe; weighing, measuring, sieving, mixing, greasing, spreading, icing, decorating you name it. The only bit we got involved in was putting it in and taking it out of the oven.
Ingredients
Directions
Pre heat the oven to 170c/325f
Add all the sponge ingredients into a large mixing bowl and mix well. Don't worry if there are a few small lumps of butter, they melt in the oven and don't seem to cause a problem. You could do this in one of those electric mixers if you have one, we don't so elbow grease is the order of the day...
Grease and line with baking parchment two cake tins and divide the mixture equally between them. Hint - tap the tins on the work surface to make sure it spreads to the sides and is smooth on top
Place in the pre-heated oven for 25-30 minutes. You can tell it's cooked by lightly touching the centre which should bounce back
Once cooked, remove from the oven, take the cake out of the tin and place on a wire rack to cool
When the cake is cooled, spread the top of one with the mascarpone and the other with the jam and then place the two pieces together to make a sandwich
To make the icing, sieve the icing sugar into a bowl and add a little food colouring and cold water. Stir together and add more water a little at a time until the icing is slowly dropping off the spoon. If you add too much water just sieve in a little more icing sugar until the consistency is right. If it's too runny it'll run down the sides of the cake and will make icing more difficult
We decided to have a football pitch on our cake that we drew with writing icing once the green icing had hardened. You can choose whatever colour icing and decorations to put on top