Tuesday 5 June 2012

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.

7 comments:

  1. Oh Jesus Christ! I haven't laughed this hard in ages. You poor love. I know how disappointing it is when a cake doesn't turn out. What can I say? Make a stew cake?

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  2. Well you tried and thats the main thing...and it looks OK as a sponge and has a nice texture, so might make an excellent trifle sponge? (if you'd split your cake batter and dyed each batch and then marbled them together you'd have had a success...that and the help of an oven thermometer maybe).

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  3. Oh bless you! What a crying bloody shame! I don't trust that Martin chap. He was very rude when he came to Bolton. Blame him...

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  4. If it makes you feel any better this regular reader made some jubilee cakes that I had to rename Irish cakes, my blue turned green and my red orange and I thought of Dom at the time too - how did he manage it? I put mine down to my lovely deep yellow hen eggs changing the colour. I also blame Dr Oetker!

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  5. Thanks all for the sympathies. Susan: oven thermometer sounds like a good idea.

    Dolly - you're a first, absolutely all the ladies I know lurve Mr Martin

    One of the ladies at the party arrived with a Victoria Sponge I swear was 8 inches tall. I'll have to get some serious practice in before the next jubilee.

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  6. Don't give up Dom - these disasters happen to us all, I had one such for my first Clandestine Cake Club Cake. Getting to know your oven is key, just turn it up a bit next time. Mine does the opposite and burns things very quickly. Anyway, it was a grand idea and we are with you all the way ;-)

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  7. Oops, don't know how I managed to confuse you and Dom??? Sorry about that :-S

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