The Great British Bake Off Technical Challenge: Victoria Sponge Cake

 It´s back....The Great British Bake Off Technical Challenge and even better, we have another person who´s decided to participate in this challenge...my good friend,Amélie from Amélie Cuisine. We decided to meet up and bake the technical challenges together and to start with opted to do a Victoria Sandwich cake using the very same recipe that the Bake Off contestants had to follow. I hadn´t realised that a Victoria Sponge cake was one of the technical challenges and as I have made Victoria Sponge cakes before, I found it quite an easy technical challenge. Probably the most difficult part is avoiding the cake from rising unevenly when baking, so you have a level cake.
                                                     
We followed the recipe to the letter, put it at 170º in a fan assisted oven and cooked for the amount of time the recipe stated. We left the cakes outside on the window sill to cool while we made and ate our lunch, brown bag fried chicken (very delicious),chips and vegetables. We had a little trouble getting the cakes out of the tin,despite having greased them, as they stuck a little and one sponge broke a little. We decided to add some fresh fruit to the original recipe to jazz it up and for decoration so we placed some halved starwberries on top of one layer, then piped some whipped cream on top of the strawberries, then placed the top sandwich on. We piped more whipped cream on the top layer, then decorated it with a ring of raspberries then blackberries, another ring of raspberries and halved strawberries,stood upwards, then sieved icing sugar over the berries.You couldn´t even tell that one of the sponges was a little damaged! We were so proud of our Victoria Sponge cake....I think it´s one of my nicest looking cakes so far!! Amélie made the bunting, which is a great touch to add to any cake....I´m definitely going to have to learn how to do that too!!

Finally, we got round to trying it and it was delicious. The sponge was light and spongy, the cream,jam and fresh fruit really complemented it and made for a really delicious cake. It was so good that I even went back for seconds....between the four of us we almost ate the whole lot! It must have been good as my daughter doesn´t always eat or even try cakes etc but she tucked in and ate quite a lot too! It´s my new favourite Victoria Sponge cake recipe...definitely worth giving a go and surprizingly not that difficult to make.Here´s a link to the recipe:Victoria Sandwich. Enjoy!