The Great Aldi Bake Off : Victoria Sponge

You may remember that last week, I shared the recipe that Aldi have come up with for the ultimate crowdsourced cake, using the Aldi Specialbuys kitchen range and crafted by Great British Bake Off finalist and cookery book writer Miranda Gore Browne. It's basically a combination of all of Britain's favourite cakes in one - cheesecake, carrot cake, fruit cake and Victoria sponge. They challenged bloggers to recreate the cake, or at least part of it, so I decided to have a go at the classic Victoria sponge. I used their recipe :

Victoria Sponge 

225g Greenvale unsalted butter, softened

225g The Pantry caster sugar,

4 large Merevale eggs

225g The Pantry self-raising flour

2 tsp The Pantry baking powder

4 tablespoons of Grandessa Strawberry Jam

Methodology:

Cream together the butter and sugar using a balloon whisk or an electric mixer. Once the mixture is pale and fluffy, add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition

On a lower speed, gently add the flour and baking powder. Mix until combined

Scrape the mixture into two lined 8 inch loose bottomed cake tins and bake in the preheated oven at 180 degrees for 20-25 mins

Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tins for 2 minutes before turning out on to a cooling rack

Once the cakes are completely cold, sandwich with a little buttercream and the strawberry jam

My sous-chef for the day was Pierre, who happily creamed together the butter and sugar and cracked in the eggs. I made him laugh by handing him an Easter egg in place of the final egg !

My initial reaction was that that was an awful lot of butter - it made a very rich, buttery cake that was very nice but not the light, airy sponge that I was aiming for.

I overfilled my sponge tin so I put a baking tray underneath to catch any drips. I didn't expect quite so much to spill over but all the overflow bits caramelised into crunchy, buttery biscuits - bonus !

I don't have two sponge tins so I made one deep cake and cut it in half before sandwiching the two halves together with strawberry jam and vanilla buttercream icing.

The kids were too impatient to eat it though and I ended up adding the filling before it was completely cooled. This made the buttercream start melting.

It tasted better than it looked !

I thought I was all out of strawberry jam but I found a jar lurking at the back of my overspill cupboard (ie things that wouldn't fit in the normal kitchen cupboard !). It had a best before date of July 2014 - oops ! - but I had a taste and it was fine.

Despite the out-of-date jam and the melted buttercream, it still got a thumbs-up from the Madhouse kids !

Due to the out-of-date jam, I'll add this to the #KitchenClearout linkie