I've been baking a lot of Victoria sponges recently using a brilliant, all-in-one recipe by Fiona Cairns. It's a fuss-free, seemingly fool-proof recipe that calls for golden caster sugar plus the standard self-raising flour, eggs, soft butter, baking powder and vanilla extract, and it produces a lovely, moist, light-as-air sponge. Aesthetically, the humble sponge sandwich isn't much to look at so I've generally not bothered snapping my efforts these last few weeks, but this cake was a gift for a friend so I went to a bit more trouble and cut out the letters of her name for a stencil effect. Good job I took this photo actually - I dropped the cake tin with Vicky inside as I left the house on the morning I was due to deliver the surprise. She wasn't too badly damaged although the letters had lost a bit of their definition. The cake was, nevertheless, well-received :-)
