victoria sponge cake - trial no. 1

Hello from Australia!! This week was the march holidays, which meant that it was finally time for me to take a break from school, work, stress and hop on a plane to go to australia. My family went overseas not only to spend time together during the holidays BUT also to celebrate my dad's birthday, so this trip was extra special.

The moment I found out that we were travelling during my dad's brithday, the first thing i thought about was...HOW AM I GONNA MAKE A CAKE FOR HIM? In my family, theres already a standard procedure, whenever we are going for a dinner party, potluck or especially Birthdays, i am the go-to cake and dessert maker. And i take pride in that. Every ocassion gives me antoher excuse to try something new, eat something sweet and add more content to my instagram and blog page. So when i found out that i wasn't going to be in my normal kitchen, with my pretty pink standmixer, oven mittens, baking trays and setup...i felt pretty worried. Thankfully when i reached my air bnb, i was so pleased to find that their baking pantry was STOCKED UP!! there was a electric hand mixer, mixing bowl, measuring cups and spoons as well as some basic ingredients like flour and sugar. Now that i had all the basic things i needed to make a cake, the last thing was just to find out from my dad what type of cake he wanted.

He said that he wanted a lighter version of a cake, so all those chocolate, red-velvet, peanut butter cakes were thrown out of the window. I was left with just a few choices, with a classic chateraise style shortcake being on one of the top choices. However, as i said before, one of the "criterias" of making a dessert for a special occasion was to add more content to my instagram page. And i had already made a shortcake before. So i went on the hunt to find a light cake that was not a shortcake and found a cake - the victoria sponge cake.

"What is a victoria sponge cake?" A lot of you might ask. Well a victoria sponge cake is bascially a two-layer cake with jam and wipped cream between the layers, and a generous dusting of powdered sugar on the top. It was a cake that apparently Queen Victoria used to eat with tea each afternoon. Fun fact is that she used to eat it with just jam inside, but the recipe was adapted to include cream as well. yumms.

Now in this blog, i will not be sharing the recipe i used for this cake because...frankly it didn't really turn out very well. Not to say that it didn't taste nice but it definetly was not a vicotria sponge cake because it only had one layer, there was no powdered sugar dusting on the top and the cake itself wasnt very light and fluffy. In my dad's word, "its like a cross between a pizza, bread and cake". I think he was overexaggerating a bit, because honestly it was still pretty good, BUT it defientely was not up to my usual standard and i will be trying out with a different recipe and in my own home soon.

Instead, i will more be talking about the *cough cough* process...that i took while baking this cake. which was quite painstaking, but memorable.

Name : Victoria Sponge Cake

Description: Soft vanilla sponge cake with a generous spread of fresh homemade whipped cream, dollops of sweet strawberry jam and cut strawberries

Flavour Rating: 5/10 (it was still a nice and pretty cake but the base wasnt super light and fluffy and didn't really resemble a Victoria sponge cake)

Difficulty rating: 5/10 (there wasnt much difficult about this recipe, because it used only a few simple ingredients and equiptment. Main difficulty came from having to make it overseas in a different environment, especially when my hand mixer broke halfway through and i had to whip cream with my arm strength)

Occasion: Birthday cake for my dad's birthday in Margaret river, Perth in the middle of a forest!

What i had on hand

Equiptment

1. Hand mixer

2. Mixing bowl

3. Oven

4. 1 large springform baking pan

5. Analog weighing scale

6. measuring cups and spoons

The kitchen was honeslty pretty well stocked for an air bnb, but there were just a few minor issues.

Number one, this cake was meant to be baked in two separate cake tins at once, because the nature of the cake was meant to have two separate cake layers that were put together, not a single layer that was cut in half. So this was a bit of a issue because i only had one cake tin. This could be solved by baking the layers once at a time, though it would take more time, this issue could be worked around.

Number two, the analog weighing scale. Whats a analog weighing scale? well its a weighing scale that looks a bit like this.

Now this might not look like a big problem, but if you have baked a few times, you would know by now that one of the crucial steps to nailing a dessert right, is to measure the ingredeints carefully and accurately. This is usually done using a digital weighing scale, like the one that i usually have at home, wehre you just put things on it and a number telling you the exact weight of the item appears on the screen. However, when it comes to using analog weighing scales, they rely on human observations to give a reading that is not super reliable or accurate. Furthermore, analog weighing scales make use of springs that can develope gradual wear and tear, further reducing its accuracy. Bascially, i did not have a very accurate machine to help me weigh out my ingredients.

Lastly, i did not have a cooling rack for my cake to be cooled on after baking. But you know what i did have? A grill basket. Yeah a rack that is used to grill meats.

Well, no problem here because the griller can just be opened up to become an elongated cooling rack! Problem solved.

As for the ingredients, i had most of the stuff and just needed to go to coles to get some basic stuff like powdered sugar baking soda and butter, nothing too out of the ordinary.

Problem 1 - Filming set-up

Usually for my tik tok videos, i have my sturdy phone stand that holds my phone in place so that i can bake with both hands and get nice wide shots of the things i made. But for this trip because i didn't know that i was going to end up baking a cake in my air bnb, i didn't bring it along. As such i did not have anything to help me film my baking process so that i could post it on instagram and tik tok for content )):

I did manage to find a selfie stick that could be converted to a unsteady tripod but whenever i tried to place my phone on it, it would just fall down. As such, i ended up with clips like this.

Super close up shots that just looked sloppy. So for this tik tok video, i decided to try out something a bit different. I thought, what if i don't film the baking process. I just show the outcome?

I think this little experiment ended up working quite well because after a few days, when i was stalking my own baking account again, i realised that this video did much better (in terms of likes and views) compared to my other videos that mainly showed the baking process. Even the post that i made which included just pictures of the end product instead of pictures of me mixing in flour and eggs into my uncooked batter ended up doing much better!

So from this seemingly bad scenerio, i ended up with a better end product that i will probably be doing more of in the future!

Problem 2 - Big cake pan

For this victoria sponge cake, the batter was meant to have a thicker consistency that was split between two small pans. Since i did not have two small pans, i thought that it would work for me to just bake my cake in the bigger pan at two separate times.

However, i did not expect the batter to end up only being enough to fill the one big cake pan!! So i could only do a single layer with hope that it would end up thick enough for me to still split in half. Sadly, when the cake came out of the oven, it was SO BIG AND THIN! thats where my dads description of a "pizza" came from...

Problem 3 - Broken eletric hand mixer

I was pretty happy when i first found out that the house had a electric hand mixer that i could use, which would come in pretty handy when creaming the butter and sugar together as well as whipping the cream.

At first, when i was creaming the butter and sugar together, the electric hand mixer worked pretty well, so making the batter wasnt much of a issue. The real problem came later on when i was whipping the cream as i realised that there was smoke and loud sounds coming out of the hand mixer. There was even this weird gasoline or toxic smell that came out from it... and it was irregularly starting and stopping.

For my own safety, i decided to ditch the mixer and use my pure hand muscles to whip up the cream. I've never done that before but it took soo long and was super tiring.

You can see the sad electirc mixer taking its break at the back with one of the whisk attatcments taken out HAHA. As a result for my hard work, when i finished whipping the cream and using it to decorate the top of the cake, i helped myself to the bowl of fresh, light, cooling whipping cream with a gigantic wooden spoon.

Problem 4 - Decoration

As this stressful journey was almost over, I could do one of my favourite parts of baking - decoration.

Since i only had one thin layer of cake to work with, i couldn't do the classic decoration that most victoria sponge cakes have which is two layers of cake with a thick generous slab of jam and cream in the middle topped with a dusting of powdered sugar.

So i decided to get a bit creative and covered the bottom first with whipped cream. Then i swirled over some fresh strawberry jam (which i bought from a farmers market just the day before!) and lastly some freshly cut strawberries (which i also bough from the same farmers market HAHA).

I get the pizza reference now. A "dough" (cake) with a "red sauce" jam and "pepperoni" (strawberries). Very funny joke dad.

All in all, while this cake was a bit of a hassle to make, it was SUPER FUN getting the experience of making a cake overseas in a unfamiliar location. The best part was defientely when we got to eat it in the morning in the middle of a forest next to hopping kangaroos. And though it wasnt easy, i learnt a couple more things and still had a super fun time making it and of course eating it.

Most importantly, i got to make a cake for my dad's birthday to show him my love and how much he means to me. I love you to the moon and back dad! thanks for always believing and supporting me in whatever i do, especially in this baking pursuit of mine.

xoxo,

nadzcrumbz

sundayzcrumbz entry #2