Obi Wan wisdom...

Well I know christmas has come and gone quicker then ever this year. Is this growing age or something greater and more cosmic? I can't decide but this year the festive season has come and gone before I could impart any of my very limited knowledge to you. What you did get is a good cake which is quite frankly, I think, a pretty decent little stocking filler. So for the wisdom, it's not much but it is valuable. What I've learned in my few short years of cooking and throwing parties and general arseing about is that you need a repertoire of food that is timeless, flawless and most importantly effortless. Think minimum input for maximum output. You need things that are easy to prepare that look great but don't nessercerily take too much toil. So for my belated gift to you, my next few food blogs are all going to be little party stunner's that you can whip out at any time and are simple saviours. I've love all of them and that's why I pass them on to you, like gorgeous little knowledge gems, like I'm Obi Wan and your my young Padawan (yes, I love Star Wars, deal with it!) This christmas I wanted little nibbles for the table to have with endless cups of tea and I don't think you can really beat truffles. You can flavour them with anything you can think of and they are only limited by how much imagination you have. My repertoire is based around three, one for white, milk and dark chocolate. My personal favourite is dark chocolate and for that I flavour it with ginger, orange and Tia Maria. Its a winning combination and could if you pleased be broken down to just include one of the flavours but I urge you to try them together, a complete winner! So number one in my 10 saviours of parties is Orange, Ginger and Tia Maria truffles. 


Ingredients: (makes around 30-40 depending on how generous you are)

• 220g of dark chocolate, good quality minimum 60% cocoa
• 220ml of single cream
• large thumb sized piece of ginger
• 3tbsp of tia maria, this can be upped to 4tbsp of tia maria if you like it a little stronger, I like it to be subtle- its a taste thing and is up to your preference
• 2tbsp of orange juice 
• cocoa powder

1. peel and grate your ginger, do this on a plate or chopping board so that you can collect all that delicious juicy pulp
2. in a heavy bottomed pan, place your grated ginger pulp, tia maria, orange juice and cream. 
3. slowly and gently warm the cream. never let the cream boil but warm till just before bubbling. the slow warming process really helps to infuse the flavours
4. while the cream is warming, put the chocolate into a bowl and smash it to little bits! - fun!! 
5. when the cream is warmed through, pour it through a sieve over your smushed chocolate and mix the two together
6. once you have swirled the two together you should be left with a dark chocolate gloop. pour the chocolatey mess into a large, shallow dish and put in the fridge to set
7. after around two hours you should be left with a glossy, firm slab of chocolate. all you then need to is scrape out a blob of chocolate, around the size of a grape and roll it between your palms. work quickly before the chocolate starts to melt and then pelt the ball into a plate of cocoa powder and roll it around with a fork or spoon or polly pocket- anything you like, though I would suggest sticking to the fork really....
8. once the truffle is suitably covered set it aside and continue until there is no chocolate left and all that remains is a mound of beautifully dark chocolate pebbles. eat and eat and eat more - perfik!  

other incarnations are fresh mint infused dark chocolate rolled in chopped nuts or white chocolate with a little baileys then covered with a layer of crushed to a fine dust snap, crackle and pops: bizarre sounding I know, but by-gum it works! As I said the possibilities are literally limited by your imagination, so play and find your favourite, but try these, you will not regret and you will have a table full of very happy, quiet guests. bliss. 

                                                    xoxoxox

 

have your cake and eat it

For someone who writes a food blog, christmas should be an uber busy time. It's a time for food and I should be doling out recipes left right and center but i think it's a bit pointless writing about how to cook a brussle sprouts. Most people generally know how to cook them (if you don't, my answer is briefly) and I want to be able to write something a little more different. This years been a strange one and I see christmas as my way to say goodbye to it. I guess most people think that that's what New Years Eve is for, but to me that's more about excitement for the coming year and what that holds, over remembering and saying goodbye to the one passed. So with the last few weeks been slightly strange for me and a little low, I didn't want a typical christmas, I wanted what any sane person would want... an ultra sparkly, pink and glitter; chocolate laced, alice in wonderland themed christmas shindig obviously. How had you not guessed sooner? My main grumble and I don't have many when it comes to christmas as I am still a complete woman-child, is christmas pudding; quite frankly I dont get it. I know that to some, most even, that not liking christmas pudding is like not liking christmas itself, its one of the christmas main-stays but after a glutinous lunch I can just never muster up the courage to  attack one with any gusto. So this year, I simply didn't make one. I didn't even entertain the idea. I had something much more exciting I think. I present to you the words- flourless, chocolate and cake. It makes perfect sense if you think about it. You can put all those beautiful  flavours into something saintly and light and avoid all that stodge that renders you slightly unconcious for the next 5 or 6 hours. The original recipe didn't have the almond crust but I have always wanted to try out the idea since I saw it on a cake by the mother of modern cooking- Julia Child. Since the cake is almond based anyway, I think its just helping to enhance the flavours already there and it gives a nice crunch and texture. This cake is, in a way, a bit of a homage to Ms Child but with a  modern twist, I don't think she would mind too much as long as Julia said, you have the "courage of your convictions about you"

                                    

For the cake:

• 150g dark chocolate, chopped
• 150g soft unsalted butter, plus some for greasing
• 6 eggs
• 250g caster sugar
• 4tsp cocoa powder
• 100g ground almonds
• 4 teaspoons icing sugar
• 1 x 23cm springform or other round cake tin 
• 2 tbsp of Tia Maria
• zest of an orange and 2 tbsp of its juice 

For the ganache and decoaration:

• 200g dark chocolate, min 60% cocoa
• 230ml single cream
• 1tbsp Tia Maria
• 150g toasted almonds

1. preheat your oven to 180°C and line your cake tin with greaseproof paper on the bottom and butter on the sides.
2. melt the chocolate and butter together in a bowl suspended over a pan of simmering water. I don't like doing it in a microwave as i think it can catch and burn to easily and spoil the cocoa quality, but if your comfier doing it that way then do, just pay a little more attention to it and keep checking and stirring! leave the mix to cool a little.
3. beat the eggs and sugar together until they are pale, doubled in size and beautifully moussey. this is best done in either a free stranding mixer or with an electric whisk. it could be done with a hand whisk but this would take dedication and muscle that I just don't have.
4. GENTLY, GENTLY, GENTLY, fold the ground almonds, cocoa powder, tia maria and orange zest and juice into your egg and sugar mixture followed finally by your cooled, melted chocolate and butter.
5. pour the mix into your prepared cake tin and bake! It can take anywhere between 30-45 minutes completely depending on your oven. start checking at 30 minutes by gently prodding the top of the cake it should be firm on top but still almost yielding underneath with a slight squash and wobble
6. remove the cake from the oven once cooked and leave to cool for around 10 minutes on a wire rack.
7. once the cake has lost its initial heat, after around 1o minutes; drape a clean tea towel over the top and let it cool in the tin. the tea towel helps to stop the cake going crusty on the top and helps it to retain lovely moisture in the center, giving it a centre that is a unique cross between a firm mousse and a soft fudge- strange but completely satisfying. The top of the cake, due to its lack of flour will sink slightly and give a cracked surface with desert like fault-lines. Don't worry about this, I think it adds to its character anyway.
8. while your cake is cooling you can make your ganache.  simply melt together the tia maria, chocolate and single cream in a bowl suspended over some boiling water stirring slowly but regularly.
9. once the cream and chocolate have combined, leave the mixture to cool so it firms slighlty. Your looking for texture like smooth peanut butter. 
10. remove the cake from its tin and move it onto a cake turntable if you have one or if not a plate covered in clingfilm. I would suggest putting clingfilm over your turntable also, it just helps when your ready to move the cake to its cakeplate or whatever your serving it from as it gives you something to grip onto without having to touch the cake and risking damage to it
11. give your cake a generous dusting of icing sugar till gloriously wintry white 
12. with a pallet knife spread the outer edge with a thick layer of your chocolate ganache mortar.
13. finally and my tip is to use a teaspoon as your hands get too chocolatey and spoil the pale glory of your almonds, take spoonfulls of almonds and press them onto the side of the cake using the chocolate ganache as your glue. all you then need do is move the cake to its final resting place, slice and munch, munch, munch. this cake is ridiculously addictive, amazing for parties and a simple and beautiful treat. compulsive baking! 

Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache

For years now, it has been so, that a carrot seems to be the only real vegetable that we put in cakes and i still know people who find it odd! Carrots!! In Cakes?? Oh thats disgusting! - Yeah weird I know as carrot cake is probably my favourite cake out there. I was having a little mooch round a bookshop one ridiculously wet afternoon and needed some kind of soul revival due to the horrific weather and I saw Harry Eastwood's "Red velvet and Chocolate Heartache". Harry is part of the team behind the brilliant "Cook Yourself Thin" series which I was already a fan of. I was instantly brought in by the cover and had to have a good instore inspection and was won over and bought it immediately. I had heard a great deal about the book already that promises to supply bountiful bucketloads of flavour via a delivery van of vegetables. Yes, It has been deemed that it is not simply carrots that we can use in our cakes but a delectable host of veggies. So to the look, firstly for a girly girl like myself the book is heaven. The pictures are a smorgasbord of pink and glitter and flowers and fun and the cakes are beautifully, if not whimsically presented. Each chapter is colour coded and she works her way through a "who's who" of the stars of the book namely Aubergine, Beetroot, Squash, Courgette and Parsnip and each ones virtues. My first run out with the book was when "The Manfriend" was going away to work so I wanted to make him a sweet treat to send him on his way. The one that called out to me, for it's simplicity and quick construction as much as the taste was "Chocolate and Peanut Butter Cupcakes". Described by Harry as "that photograph of your sister or son, who, aged two and a half, is hiding in a corner of the birthday party with chocolate smeared all over their face". For as indulgent as this description is, It is actually completely correct. Its the shock as you bite into it, the surprise of the taste and the insistence that anyone watching you would remove themselves so you can return back to your chocolate universe undisturbed. The surprise punch in this knock-out cake is the vegetable itself. Possibly an obvious choice to substitute the carrot for, for its similar sweetness is a butternut squash. So here is my attempt, which for the evening was re-named the "Goodbye for Now Cupcake"

Makes 12
Ingredients:
100g unsalted peanuts (if you don't have a food processor to grind down the peanuts, simply replace them with ground almonds, they work just as well)
3 medium free-range eggs
200g light muscavado sugar
200g peeled and finely grated butternut squash
                                   (or pumpkin)
100g white rice flour
40g of best quality cocoa powder
                         (I like green and blacks...)
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt


For the icing:
60g smooth peanut butter
2 tbsp of golden icing sugar, sieved
2 tbsp cocoa powder
pinch of salt
5tbsp boiling waters 


For the top:
small handful of roughly chopped peanuts or some grated dark chocolate

• preheat your oven to 180°C. Line your muffin tray with 12 paper cases
• blitz the peanuts in a food processor until totally ground into a fine, even powder 
• whisk the eggs and sugar for 5 minutes until a pale coffee colour and beautifully fluffy
• next whisk in the grated pumpkin, followed by the flour,cocoa powder, baking powder, salt and peanuts until everything is completely combined and lusciously covered 
• congratulate yourself on a thoroughly excellent whisking! .....my step not hers, but completely necessary
•  spoon the mixture into the paper cases so that it comes four fifths of the way up the sides then place in the oven for 30 minutes. Just as a note- my cakes took only 22 minutes so i would suggest checking them after the 20 mark by giving them a good prodding with a wooden skewer)
• remove the cakes from the oven and cool for 10 minutes in the tray and then transfer to the fridge and leave to cool completely
• To make the icing, mix the peanut butter, icing sugar,coca powder and salt with the back of a spoon to form a paste. Next slowly and gently incorporate the boiling water with a balloon whisk, one spoonful at a time. You get a smooth and delicious paste. Ice the cupcakes when completely cold and decorate with some roughly chopped nuts or some grated chocolate

To me though, the proof was in the pudding and the happy look on the man's face was enough for me, though getting him to let me photograph him was another story....

I was ridiculously happy with the cookbook which is just a joy to devour. It may be a bit self indulgent for some but I like self indulgent, I mean isn't that what this type of cooking needs to be; spoiling yourself and whoever it is your cooking for?! Where this book is indulgent in verse, it makes up for it in the shrewdness off calories and for a cupcake with chocolate and peanuts and icing all for less then 200 calories- I don't need to say anymore except for buy this book and treat yourself; your waistline will thank you! 

xoxox

grandad crumble.....

Yesterday was monumental for 2 reasons. Firstly, apparently we are experiencing the earliest, heaviest snowfall for 17 years! Its crazy, I just thought it had finally stopped and then I looked out the window and its coming down again. The weather also seems to have something to do with my horrifically expanding waistline. It just makes me want to eat mashed potatoes and stew....constantly. I think I have put on approximately 90 stone, give or take a few pounds... but yes, nearly 90 stone. The second thing was that I actually got my grandad to come to my house for dinner! If you can get him to leave his own house and have something to eat you have a success on your hands of epic proportions. So with him coming over for his dinner there was some nostalgia hanging in the air I think, part grandad visit, part heavy snow! So for dessert I cooked up what is surely one of the classic childhood staples- the crumble. When I was a child though sadly it was usually apple crumble which i detest. Just based on the fact that I cant abide cooked apples! Don't like the the texture, that grainy baby pulp- blurgh! Now this crumble on the other hand, with its cheek suckingly sour berries and crunchy almond flaked topping is heaven! 

Ingredients- makes 4 deep filled individual pots or 1 large in a pie dish

• 600 grams of berries.  I used a frozen selection of raspberries, blueberries and morello cherries
• 3 tablespoons of caster sugar
• 150g of plain flour
• 1tsp of baking powder
• 110g of unsalted butter, cold and cubed
• 3 tblsp of vanilla sugar
• 3 tblsp of demerara sugar
• 50g or flaked almonds, half chopped, half whole

• preheat your oven to about 190°c 
• allow your fruits, if your using frozen ones to defrost and sieve off the juice that has come off. alot more will come off during the cooking and you want a thick sauce, not a watery mess. Stir in the 3 tablespoons of caster sugar and leave to rest and absorb 
• put the flour and the baking powder into a bowl and then rub in the cold cubed butter with your fingertips. You can't rub it with your palms or it will melt the butter and you wont achieve the sort of oatmeal texture that your looking for

• stir in your demerara and vanilla sugars then the 25g of chopped almonds with a fork so that you keep all the grains seperate and theres no clumping, then add the rest of the almonds and give it another quick forking

• divide the berries between their ramekins if thats what your using, or tumble them into a pie dish
• cover the pies with the crumble topping, making sure it goes right up to the outside edge of the dish so that the filling doesn't bubble up too much and give you a soggy topping
• put your ramekins or pie dish on a baking tray so that any juices that do bubble over don't run all over your oven and then bake for 30-40 minutes or till the topping is golden and scorched in places.
• remove, serve and enjoy! I like mine with vanilla ice cream.

xoxox

something for a snowy day....

Today the snow in lovely old Hull has been coming down a treat! Noah especially loves the snow and has been rolling about in it for ages, he's a very excited puppy!

Snow may make the puppy want to go out and play but it makes me want to do the complete opposite.

I go into hibernation mode and want nothing more then to cocoon myself on the sofa with something delicious and some Glen Miller on the record player! Yes I am only 23 i know that, but it makes me happy to be a nana! My highest aim is to be one of the grandparents from Charlie and the Chocolate factory! 

So anywhooo with all this cold weather I felt that me and the man friend needed something chocolatey and warming to see us through and therefore my crispy chocolate fondants 

Ingredients- makes 8

• 3 medium eggs
• 45g caster sugar
• 60ml extra light olive oil (good quality) 
• 30ml water
• 150g dark chocolate
• 110g soft brown sugar
• 75g plain flour
• 1tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 20g ground almonds
• 1 tbsp good quality cocoa powder

1. Start by warming the oven to 180°c. Grease 8 ramekins and set them aside on a baking tray
2. Separate your eggs and put the yolks aside. Whisk up the egg whites so that they start to form fluffy peaks but are not firm. Add the caster sugar in thirds and keep mixing for a minute or so. Set aside
3. Melt the chocolate either in a bowl suspended over a pan of  boiling water or in a microwave set at half power. It should take about 3 minutes in the microwave, but stop it half way through and give it a good stir.
4. In a separate bowl combine the egg yolks with the olive oil, water, soft brown sugar and melted chocolate. Sift in the remaining dry ingredients-flour, baking powder, bicarb and cocoa powder. Finally stir in the ground almonds. This should give you a very thick batter.
5. Fold in the egg whites, a third at a time. The first third can be firmly combined as it is a thick batter that your trying to incorporate it into. For the other 2 thirds, try not to mess with it too much, we want to keep as much of the air in as possible. 
6. Decant the mixture between your 8 ramekins and bake on the middle shelf, center of the oven for around 12-15 minutes depending on your oven. I check every 2 minutes after the 12 mark, just by prodding a skewer into the center of your sponge. It should look crisp and cracked on the top, be slightly wobbly to the touch and there should be a chocolatey goo that comes out on the skewer! Done!
7. Serve straight away, either on its own with a dusting of cocoa powder or with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a scattering of fresh raspberries- perfection! 

christmas spice girl....

This years christmas dinner is taking some thought... I have an uncle who is categorically refusing to eat a traditional christmas dinner and a granddad who would eat nothing else... so where is the happy medium. I've been stressing about it for weeks and the day is already stressful enough for the cooks without adding more pressure, so I think i'm going to have to do 1 Turkey, 2 roast veg trays. Last year i faffed about making a million separate little dishes from pickled red cabbage, about a million different potato dishes, roast carrots, boiled carrots, regular brussel sprouts, brussel sprouts with chestnuts and bacon... it was too much to say the least. For an extra large picture-book style christmas with 10, 12, 15 people round the table this is sort of fine. You feel like your doing it in substantial enough quantities but this year I will be cooking for 3 and its just not worth it, so im going to have to do something else to make it special and I think its going to be roast veg based. The premise is brilliant, one tray, a host of different veg all cooked at the same time giving chef Bea more time to sit around in my christmas Pj's watching The Wizard of Oz. This week i've been practising the non-traditional uncle's tray. He wants spice and flavour to his food so i'm basing his around sweet potatoes, onion, carrots and peppers. Sounds slightly plain I know but these four simple vegetables shall be transformed I promise!! And they shall be transformed  into something along the lines of this...

spicy moroccan style vegetable tray bake

ingredients- for 2 people as a main meal or 4 as a side dish...

• 1 large sweet potato
• 2 medium carrots
• 1 medium yellow pepper
• 1 medium red pepper
• 1 large red onion
• 3 fat garlic cloves
• 150g of feta
• 2 tsp of chilli flakes (less or more depending how firey you like it)
• 1 tsp cinnamon 
• rind of 2 satsumas, juice of 1
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp paprika 
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• sea salt
• 2 tbl sp olive oil
• handful of fresh corriander

• pre heat the oven to 200°c
• cut up your vegetables into nice wedges, leave the skins on the carrots and potato, just make sure you've given them a good scrub. the wedges should be about the size of a fun size mars bar...odd reference i know but its the only sort of object that i can think to compare them to...
• put all your vegetables in a large roasting tray and cover with the chilli flakes, cinnamon, cumin, paprika, ginger, satsuma rind and sea salt. 
• in a small bowl, mix together your oil and 1/2 of the satsuma juice then pour this over the veg
• get your hands in there and give the veg a good rub making sure that all the pieces are coated
• wash your hands!!! chillies + eyes = bad times....
• make sure the veg are more or less laid in a single layer, this will help with the roasting so that they don't steam and crisp up beautifully! 
• sprinkle to veg with a generous pinch of sea salt
• tent the roasting tray in a sheet of tin foil and put in the oven for 30 minutes
• after the 30 minutes remove the tin foil and pop back in the oven
• with 10 minutes left, take the tray out of the oven and hunt down and remove the garlic cloves then scatter the roast with chunks of feta and return it to the oven till it is slightly blistered and gold speckled
• as soon as it is has had its last 10 minutes, or the feta is sufficiently browned, remove from the oven and sprinkle with the remaining satsuma juice and handful of chopped coriander

I served mine with a crisp toasted flat bread as we had it by itself for our dinner, but it will make a great side dish to go with a host of different mains. It would be great with a piece of oven roasted salmon, i think that will be a dinner next week so i will report back with my findings, but im sure it would be fantastic!! So thats Ian's veg for christmas dinner sorted. Although it's not very traditional, it really makes up for it in the flavour stakes and i should be happy i suppose that ive got some veg in there somewhere!

Get well soon Charlotte!!!

Well today my lovely bff decided to go and trap a nerve in her neck a bit and has rendered herself practically immobile. To give her a bit of a relax and put your feet up I decided that me and the man friend should take her little one off her hands for the day and go do some playing. Well the trip to Kinderland (think climbing frames, slides and ball pools, 90% ball, 10% wee and poo..) was quite a success,but i think it was my baking that really did the trick! Seen as it was very last minute I had precious little time to get ingredients so it was a bit of a raid the cupboards job but luckily i came up trumps with a new recipe I flung together. Going back the success to the christmas spice and clementine cupcakes which she loved, i thought i would try and convert them into a tea dunking-on sofa-with duvet cookie! Who wouldn't feel better??

 Here are my -

                "Get Well Soon Charlotte's"

Ingredients...

• 110g of unsalted butter at room temperature
• 20g of caster sugar
• 35g of soft brown sugar
• zest of a clementine
• 1 generous tsp of cinnamon
• 1 tsp of allspice
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 4 tblsp of icing sugar
• 1 tblsp of runny honey

• warm your oven to 200°c 
• grease a large baking sheet
• congratulate yourself on an excellent greasing!
• cream together your butter, spices, honey, clementine and sugars till they form a fluffy ochre heap
• sift in the flour and mix till the ingredients combine and start to stick together
• bring the mixture together with your hands to form a yielding ball of dough. don't play with it too much or you will spoil your pastry, pastry hearts cold hands!! 
• pop you pastry ball in a food bag or in a piece of cling film and let it rest in the fridge for half an hour
• find something meaningless to potter about with for half an hour ( I'm a secret arrow word addict!!)
• roll out your dough on a flour sprinkled surface- were talking snowflakes not blizzards- to around a pound coin thickness, no more...
• Use any cutter of around 3inches. Obviously the size of your cutter dictates your eventual bounty but i get a comfortable 14 cookies.
• place on your greased baking sheet and then bake for 8-12 minutes, until a beautiful deep beeswax shade
• leave to cool on the baking sheet for 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack 
• whilst the cookies are cooling, in a bowl mix together the icing sugar with around 2 tblsp of water, its hard to say the precise amount, just add a little water at a time till you get a pourable icing
• once the cookies are completely cool dribble with the icing in any manor you feel, i like a nice zig zag action
• eat&enjoy!

Wondercake!

• Originally, me and the man friend were doing the big white wedding business BUT when we actually got up in it and found out how much planning and stressing and extreme dieting it takes, well, it has to be said that's just not us. So now we are having every little girls dream- an Elvis wedding in Las Vegas! I have always said that the only way i would get married was Vegas style, so I don't know why we ever tried planning anything different, when Elvis beckons, resistance is futile!! One thing that I do not regret was that when we thought we were doing a big wedding was that I simply refused to buy a wedding cake. I figured when you love baking as much as me, it would be a sin to not at least try. So i equipped myself with Peggy Porschen's "Cake Chic". For anyone who doesn't know who she is, she's a bit of a cake goddess and counts Elton John, Stella McCartney and Madonna as clients, so the girls got the stats to back it up... I based my cake on her basic "Large Cake" recipe. One thing that i was completely oblivious to is how long it actually takes to construct one of these bad boys! She says that, for tiered cakes you need to start preparation 5/6 days before your event. The basic strategy is, say you need a cake for a Saturday
• Bake the sponges on the Monday before
• Layer them on the Tuesday
• Cover the cakes with marzipan on Wednesday and leave overnight so that the marzipan has time to dry
• Thursday  cover the cakes with sugar paste and let them set again overnight
• Friday is applying decorations

This at first sounds ridiculously daunting but in actuality I think it helps. So the cake starts with a basic Victoria  Sponge recipe which you can utilise for Fondant Fancies or Cup Cakes... This however, in a 20cm cake tin makes 1 half a tier layer. 

Ingredients

• 200g salted butter at room temp
• 200g caster sugar
• 4 medium eggs at room temp
• 200g self raising flour
• 100ml sugar syrup

• Warm the oven to 180°c, baking time is 12-15 minutes for the cupcakes and fancies or 20-45 minutes for a large cake depending on size
• So there's the basic cake recipe. If your not going for the whole iced variety like i was, just layer up the sponges with some jam and butter cream and you have the most amazing Victoria sponge you've ever eaten! Its the sugar syrup that keeps the cake moist for days on end. Its the best cake tip I've learnt in a long time and now i don't bake a cake without doing it! 
• Right, so you've done a little sleepy and your cake has firmed up nicely and drank in all you yummy sugar syrup. Sooooooo your gonna need..

• approx 600g of butter cream 
• approx 600g of jam (your favourite- I like a Raspberry jam here- strawberry can get a bit sickly, whereas Raspberry has a nice sour twang to it)
• 200ml of sugar syrup
• icing sugar for dusting 
• 850g of marzipan
• a shotglass of clear alcohol ( i used vodka as its taste neutral)
• 850g sugar paste

• using a serrated knife trim off the crusts from the top and bottom of both sponges
• slice each layer in half so you now have 4 layers of approximately 2cm depth
• place your first layer on a cake board and if you have one and i would a million percent suggest in buying one, there not expensive, a cake turntable! I don't think i could have done the cake without it, it makes spreading a doddle!
• spread a thin layer of butter cream over the top of the sponge and put on layer 2
• soak with syrup in the same way you did after baking
• keep layering away, next with jam and then butter cream until all 4 layers are assembled.  When all 4 layers are built up, gently but firmly press down to make your cake level

• coat the outside of your cake with butter cream. Start from the center and spread outwards and towards the sides rotating the turntable as you go
• push the butter cream down the sides and spread it in a nice even layer
• chill for at least 2 hours, I did mine overnight, so that the cake has time to firm up
• now your cakes set, dust your work surface with icing sugar and roll out your marzipan into a circle that's going to be big enough to cover the tops and sides
• dust the marzipan with another light sprinkling of icing sugar and roll it over a rolling pin to help you transport it to the cake

• trim off any extra marzipan around the bottom with a knife or scissors if your comfier with them
• polish the marzipan with a cake smoother to help it adhere to the butter cream and use the palm of your hands to smooth in the edges

• let the marzipan set overnight, go have a bath, get some bubbles on the go and be un-cakey for a while!
• return to cake fresh as a daisy
• so now its set nice and firm, brush the marzipan with a frugal coating of alcohol. It works like an edible prit-stick and glues the icing to the marzipan. Also as if by magic the alcohol kills any nasty bacteria that could have built up on your cake during the setting periods. 
• repeat steps 10-13 but this time using your rolled out sugar paste instead of marzipan
• voila! one perfectly iced cake. Decorate and layer and repeat and play with as you see fit, i did......

 

xoxo