Mary Berry shares her tips for a perfect Victoria Sponge
Mary’s easy chocolate cake recipe is available on BBC Good Food and it states that it serves eight to 10 people, taking just 25 minutes in the oven.
What’s more, it only takes around 10 minutes to create the chocolate batter.
The description reads: “Chocolate cake meets Victoria sponge in Mary’s easiest ever chocolate cake recipe filled with cream and jam.”
After making Mary’s classic Victoria sponge cake last week, I was intrigued to see how the chocolate version compared.
The first step is to line two 20cm tins with baking paper to stop the cake from sticking in the tins.
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Ingredients:
For the cake:
225g unsalted butter, softened
225g caster sugar
Four free-range eggs
220g self-raising flour
One tsp baking powder
50g cocoa powder
For the filling:
Four tbsp apricot jam
300ml whipping cream, softly whipped
Method:
To start with, I preheated the oven to 180C/Fan 60C before making sure the bases of the tins were completely lined.
Next, I put the butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder and cocoa into my stand mixer and mixed it for two minutes.
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An electric mixer is best for this part of the recipe, but a wooden spoon will also work too, it’ll just take a longer time.
The mixture was quite thick and it didn’t look like there was much to fill two tins but I resisted putting a splash of milk in because I wanted to follow the recipe entirely.
However, if I was normally baking a cake, I would put some liquid into the mixture to loosen it slightly.
Due to the thick mixture, it was quite hard to put it into the two tins but after some work, I managed to smooth out the top on both of them so that they rose nicely in the oven.
I baked the cake for 25 minutes and double-checked it was done by placing a cake skewer into the middle of the cake.
The recipe then said to leave the cakes to cool in the tins for five minutes before running a small knife around the edge and turning them onto a wire rack.
I peeled off the paper and left it to cool completely before moving on to the filling. I’m not a huge fan of jam in a chocolate cake but decided to follow the recipe and try it out.
I started by softly whipping up some double cream in my stand mixer and scooping some apricot jam onto the base of one cake.
Once the jam had reached my desired consistency, I piped this on top of the jam before placing the other cake on top of the cream.
I sprinkled with icing sugar before cutting a slice and trying it out for the first time. It was delicious and chocolatey, without being too rich like some recipes can be as well as being nice and light.
The jam added a little sharpness to balance out the sweetness from the cake and cream and it overall made a lovely pudding.
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