#3 Cooking post: Plain Sponge cake with strawberries and Butter icing.

Sponge cake with strawberries, strawberry jam and butter icing.

To make a decent cake I follow one rule:

Add equal parts butter, sugar and flour. Then add eggs until it has a smooth consistancy but doesn't pour like soup.

For this particular cake I used:

Cake:

1. 8oz of self-raising flour.
2. 6oz of sugar ~(this cake has alot of icing and jam in the middle so i used less sugar than if it was un-iced)
3. 6oz of butter (I used less butter because it's spreadable butter which is softer and you don't need as much as if you used a block of butter...)
4. Three large free-range eggs.
   

• Mix everything in a bowl until smooth then pour into two greased tins.
• Bake for 15-20 mins (until it is brown and bouncy to touch!) at 180degrees.
• Take both from their tins (used a knife to ply them out if they stuck to the tin at all) and leave one to cool.

Filling:

• Take the other one and apply a thin layer of jam to the top.
• Then I added a layer of sliced strawberries before placing the top layer of cake above it.

Topping:

• Mix a small box (yes, the whole box...) of icing sugar with three heaped tablespoons of butter (i used spreadable butter)
• When all is mixed to form a thick batter, add water (about four tablespoons) until it is thin enough to spread with a knife.
• (you might want to put some aside before adding the water because it was too thin to pipe...)
• Take your cake and add big drops of icing over the top then spread with the back of a spoon.
• If the cake crumbles under the icing, add more icing.
• do the same with the sides by applying it with the back of the spoon.
• Slice strawberries and put them around the edges
• use a piping gun or bag to add a circle of decorative icing or drops of icing.
• Add more strawberries!

The whole thing took about an hour but it's worth it!