279: Jubilee Victoria Crumb

When I write this, sometimes I think I give a rather misleading impression of my life as all rather lah-di-dah. I shall reaffirm any such misconceptions now.

The other thing (are there any?) any regular readers may have noted is that I tend to cook big pans of stews, curries roast dinners and pies. There is a reason for this.

Monday saw our street having a jubilee party and you were supposed to bring your own food. I thought I'd have a go for a jubilee based cake. I was inspired by Dom @Belleau Kitchen who recently cooked this multi-coloured beauty:

Serendipity to the fore this Saturday James Martin gave a masterclass in cooking a Victoria Sponge. I also have his book. I didn't even need to google! Following somewhere between the reccipe from the telly and the one from the book, I proceeded merrily along...


Instead of going for colour blocks like Dom, I thought I'd go for swirly colours - so once I'd made the cake batter I put a few drops of red and blue food colouring in, and then tried to only stir a few times to ensure the colours stayed reasonably seperate.

At this stage, it was already looking pretty unappealing.

Lovely Jamesy as my wife calls him, says that the cake should take 25 minutes. 25 minutes in, it still looked fairly raw - which probably only shows that my oven doesn't cook hot enough. After 15 minutes saw the cake turn to springy when prerssed; which is the sign of done-ness.


Time to turn the cake out...

And this was the best I could manage. The second one was even worse. I can easily accept that my cake didn't rise much and I should have lined the tin better, but I'm not sure how the bejaysus my blue and red food dye came out orange and green.

There was simply no hope of trying to ice it. As soon as I touched it, it crumbled. To be fair, the crumbs tasted nice! I ended up arriving at the jubilee bash with a packet of bird's eye burgers - very poor indeed.

So, this is the reason I cook stews and curries - 'cos I'm bloody rubbish at cake.