Normally my cakes lean towards the “Stodgy“, by that I mean rich boozy fruit cakes or tea loafs like Bira Brith, however it was time to try out sponges. After looking on the net for various recipes and watching some conflicting advice on youtube I decided to go to the font of all knowledge that is Mary Berry and her Baking Bible. I did not want a massive cake in case my first sponge was a failure so I decided to use 7 inch cake tins.
What you will need
- 175g Caster Sugar
- 175g Soft Butter (room temp)
- 175g Self Raising Flour
- 3 Eggs
- 1 1/2 tspn of baking powder
- Raspberry Jam or Conserve
How to make it.
- Measure out 175g of butter and allow to soften up, I find that cutting it in to small cubes around 1cm in size. Little tip if your doing this in the winter you might want to zap it in the microwave for 5 seconds just before using it.
- Butter the inside of 2 x 7 inch sandwich tins, then line the base with grease proof paper or baking parchment.
- Set the oven to 160 degrees (fan) and then leave to warm up, it’s a pain if you have to wait till it warm up once have all the ingredients mixed.
- Drop the softened butter,sugar, flour baking powder and eggs into a mixing bowl and mix with a mixer, I use a hand Mixer and it is always good to start on a low setting or you get rather a mess.
- Mix until all the ingredients have combined, make sure that you scrape the spatters and excess mix from the sides of the bowl. It is best not to over mix the mixture.
- Spoon around half the mix into each Sandwich tin and make sure the mix reaches the sides of the tin, do not worry about smoothing out the mix as it will level out in oven.
- Place the filled tins in the oven for around 20 – 25 minutes, do not open the oven for the first 20 minutes or your sponge may sink in the middle. Once the Sponge has a golden colour and has risen open the oven and do the finger test, gently press a finger to the top of the sponge and if it rises back up then they are ready, the cake mix should also have slightly shrunk away from the sides of the tin.
- Take the cakes from the oven and place them on a cooling tray for around 10 minutes.
- Remove the cakes from the tins, if you have used tins with removable bases I find sitting them on a mug and letting the sides slip away is a good way to do it. Remove the base and the grease proof paper form the bottom of the cake then leave to rest on a cooling tray for another 10 minutes.
- Place one one of the cakes on a plate or cake board then spread a layer of the jam on top, while Raspberry is traditional, Strawberry will work just as well. If the jam is rather thick you can warm it up a little in the microwave to make the spreading easier.
- Now put the other cake on top and dust with icing sugar to make it look pretty.
