Hannah's Victoria Sandwich ... in all her glory

The Victoria Sandwich .... a British classic and a great first bake to get us off the starting block. When searching for my recipe of choice, I came across a lot of variations but decided to stick to the traditional recipe but with the addition of buttercream icing.

I used the recipe from Mary Berry's Baking Bible and then found the buttercream recipe from the BBC Good Food website.

The recipe was easy to follow and involved just putting all of the ingredients in to one bowl, so was definitely a fool-proof recipe.

When it came to pouring the mixture in to the cake tins, I was trying out a new product I'd bought a while ago called Cake Release from Lakeland and it's meant to act as a substitute for greaseproof paper/butter. The cakes came out of the oven looking golden brown and smelling amazing!

However, the real test would be how easy it was for the cakes to come out, the first one popped out really easily, but the second one stuck to the bottom of the pan a bit and I had to call for re-inforcements to come and assist so that it didn't crack. The Cake Release didn't leave any grease on the cake and it could have been that I didn't use enough of it for it to work properly, so i'll use it again before writing it off! Once cooled I took the cakes out of the tins on to a clean tea towel, before turning them on to the wire racks (a tip from Mary Berry herself to stop the cakes being dented by the wire rack).

I let the cakes cool down completely, so that the buttercream wouldn't melt once applied. The buttercream was easy to work with and after putting 3 spoonfulls on to one side of the cake (the side with the slight hole in it), I used a palette knife to smooth it down. This was then followed by raspberry jam and applied in the same way.

The other half was then lifted on top and finished with a spinkling of caster sugar and a few raspberrys for decoration, resulting in my Victoria Sponge displayed on an Emma Bridgewater cake stand.

The tasting committee (my slightly bias boyfriend) rated it 10 out of 10 appearance wise and 10 out of 10 for taste, so a big thumbs up, but realistically how wrong can a Victoria Sandwich go? (...luckily for me you couldn't notice the hole that the cake tin left!)

Overall I would recommend the recipe and will definitely be using it again