Bloggers Bake Along to GBBO: FINAL WEEK: Classically British Cake

As mentioned in my previous post, I decided to make TWO bakes for the final week, instead of my usual one. This of course meant I set myself far too much work, raised the bar far too high, and ended up getting myself stressed. However something decent actually came out of it!

As soon as I hear the term Classic British Cake, I immediately think Victoria Sponge cake. It's so quintessentially British to me, that I just knew I had to make one. I also didn't just want to make your bog standard sponge cake, so I thought to myself... 'What is the most British thing I can think of in relation to cake?'. The answer of course, was tea... Tea and cakes, afternoon tea, what could be more British. So I set myself the (what I thought was easy) task of making a Teapot Cake! So here's how it all came into being...

It all started with a sponge. I mixed all the ingredients together in my mixer, and then used some Hemisphere tins that I got from Lakeland to make to half sphere cakes. This was probably the easiest part of the whole process truth be told...

Then I moved onto making a jam... this was the first time I had ever attempted a jam, and considering I didn't have a fancy sugar thermometer I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I think I'm going to be making this often because it tastes so much better than supermarket cheap jam, and it only took me about 30 minutes to make!

Then I made a simple butter-cream icing which simply involves creaming butter and then slowly bit by bit adding icing sugar. This is probably the simplest of all icings to make, so still didn't run into any issues here!

Then came the putting together of the cake... WOW was this a flipping nightmare. So I crumb coated the sphere halves with the butter-cream icing so that my fondant would stick. and then I made one of the spheres flat on the bottom so it would stand. Then I topped that with butter-cream and jam, before putting the final sphere on top. Next I rolled out my fondant, which I happened to colour myself, which just took such a freaking long time that I wanted to cry. Then the WORST step of all... putting the fondant onto the cake. This was my first time covering a cake with fondant, so picking to do it on a sphere cake was probably a bad move on my part. It just didn't go smoothly... literally. Once I was relatively happy I moved on to the other decoration. So I made a little lid by rolling out white fondant and using a cookie cutter. Then I rolled a small ball for the little lid handle. For some unknown reason I decided to make a polkadot tea pot, so I also spent half an hour piping little dots onto my teapot, before using toothpicks to add a handle, and spout. Finally adding gold accents with a brush and gold edible paint.

There we have it, my classically British victoria sponge cake! I am so happy that it turned out OK, considering the blood, sweat and tears (figuratively) that went into this.

What have you baked this week?