Victoria Sponge Drops

Dear Readers,

Q: What do you do when you feel like eating a Victoria Sponge, but you don't want to make an entire cake / haven't got quite enough ingredients in the house?
A: Make Victoria Sponge Drops!

It is true that until yesterday I thought I had invented this delicacy myself. Yesterday, however, I found myself BROWSING THE LAKELAND WEBSITE. I know. Or rather, I don't know either. Is this something that suddenly happens to you? One day you're blogging about secret-book-launches in trendy nightspots, the next you're browsing the tupperware section of a 1970s kitchenware website. But I digress. On the front page of the website I was astonished/dismayed to see my Victoria Sponge Drops! Well, not mine (mine aren't uniformly shaped) but a cake coming from the same strand of imagination-based synaptic pathway. (Scientists, forgive me if that is an incorrect term.)

Anyway, it turns out I can't claim to have invented them, but I can share the making method with you.

Bake a batch of plain vanilla fairy cakes. Find the recipe here: Silver Whimsy's Fairy Cakes

Whip up some double cream with some vanilla bean paste and a tablespoon of sieved icing sugar to add depth of flavour and beautiful vanilla bean flecks. WHIPPING TIP: Always whip cream in a metal bowl and place both bowl and balloon whisk in the fridge a couple of hours before you start whisking it up to make it easier to whip. 

Make sure you don't over-whip your cream. You are looking for something pillowy that softly drops off the spoon rather than something stiff and structured.  

Take one of your cakes and cut it in half with a sharp knife. 

Place a teaspoon of raspberry jam on to the bottom half of the cake and spread it out. Add a squished raspberry on top of this. (OK, I admit, this ain't exactly the baking equivalent of rocket science, but it does make for a very tasty morsel!) 

 Dollop some of your whipped cream on top and spread/swirl out slightly.

Replace the top and liberally sprinkle with icing sugar to create a perfect mouthful of deliciousness. 

These Victoria Sponge Drops are truly perfection on a plate. Here you can see the SIBF tucking in. Serving suggestion = with or without MacBook depending on how you're feeling.

Enjoy,
Silver Whimsy x

Brazil Nut Espresso Cake

Dear Readers, 

I had promised you a complex Saturday Brazil nut extravaganza grace a Dan Lepard, however, I changed my mind! I *am* still delivering a coffee cake with brazil nuts, but I have decided to forego the Lepard inclusion of wholemeal flour and actual ground roasted coffee beans and have created my own version. This is a Brazil Nut Espresso Cake that can be made in an express Saturday fashion! 

 Follow the basic ingredients for a Victoria Sponge - ie weigh three (or four if you're after a super-huge cake) eggs in their shells and use that measurement to weigh out the same weight of butter, caster sugar and self raising flour. Then make an espresso and have your roughly chopped brazil nuts and vanilla extract at the ready! (I held four brazil nuts back for decoration and used 75g of nuts in total!)

Beat the butter til its pale, then add the sugar and cream together. Crack in the eggs one by one and beat in thoroughly (add a tablespoon of self raising flour if the mix looks as if it's going to curdle).

Make your espresso and beat it in along with a teaspoon or so of vanilla. Then fold in your self raising flour with a large silver spoon, followed by the roughly chopped brazil nuts, and put into two greased and lined Victoria Sponge tins. Bake in the oven at 170 fan assisted for about thirty minutes - top should be golden and springy when it's ready and the cake should be moving away from the sides of the tin. Or insert a skewer and it should come out with a few crumbs stuck to it if the cake's ready. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

Meanwhile, make the coffee flavoured buttercream icing! I swear by the ratio of 100g butter to 300g golden icing sugar, about one tablespoon or so of espresso and a dash of vanilla. Beat the butter in a bowl then add the icing sugar, begin to beat in (reserving a little icing sugar in the bowl) before adding the espresso and vanilla. The liquid makes it much easier to beat together, but keep testing as you beat more icing sugar in as you should make the icing to your own taste.

When the cakes are cool, use about half the buttercream to sandwich them together and the other half to ice the top of the cake. ICING TIP: I always start by dolloping small amounts of icing around the circumference of the 'base cake' so that you have the illusion of extremely thick icing and then use a spatula to spread it across the rest of the cake base. When icing the 'top cake', follow the same idea but in reverse ie work from the inside of the cake outwards. Does that make any sense??

Et voila! A Brazil Nut Espresso Cake in express time! To decorate, I shaved the held-back brazil nuts and scattered them around the edge along with some shaved dark chocolate to give the look of the crema on top of an espresso!

One more day to go!!
Silver Whimsy x

The Silver Whimsy Cake Stall (2:0)

And so it was, Dear Readers, that a Whole Year passed and it was time for The Silver Whimsy Cake Stall (2:0) to be held once more at West Hampstead's finest Jester Festival!

The aim this year was for everything to be slightly less frantic, slightly more calm and slightly less damaging to general physical, emotional and mental health and...guess what?? With the help of my ever suffering, completely amazing SIBF (who has cleaned the kitchen so many times over the past three days that he deserves a medal, or alternatively beer for life), super-star cousin Lee (who both baked delicious peanut butter cookies and gave us a lift to the festival site with our ten stone trestle table), and bestest friends Sally and Dave Emery (who left thir tea-towel empire to come and visit the festival and took all these WONDERFUL photos), it was!

Obviously, that doesn't mean that there weren't any nervous bake-downs over how to make enough cakes, or crisis' over the fact that, whatever the trendy magazines say, Whoopie Pies actually do just taste horrible, but generally speaking things went a lot more smoothly and there was a lot less to cry about! The major difference this year was that we actually have our own super-cute and phenomenally indie kitten called Tilly,

which meant that I didn't have to go all Hepburn over a stray cat that turned out not to be a stray cat after all... (New readers check out entry number one for more info...) This had both positive and negative implications. Positive because I knew there would be a kitten waiting for me at the end of the day but negative because I had to keep the kitten out of the kitchen for a few days which meant that she was a little bit cross with me.

Anyway, a lot of baking products were purchased to make all the sweet treats for the festival. I started off by making the Pistachio Meringues because they keep for quite a long time so could be made in advance.

I even phoned up Ottolenghi for advice on how best to store them! Then I moved on to the Lemon Drizzle Cake which is a phenomenally popular cake stall cake.

A lovely gentleman bought four slices and then returned the next day to buy some different cake because he'd enjoyed it so much! That was one of the best things about the festival. I had repeat customers from the previous year! People were so charmed by the spirit of Whimsy that they remembered the stall and sought it out, and if they were new customers then they returned for Day Two because they loved it so. The only problem with this was that I actually sold out of cakes on Day One which meant that I was up all night re-baking for Day Two! I found myself making meringues at midnight...

and fairy cakes at four am!

I was particularly proud of my Victoria Sponge

made with organic raspberries and freshly whipped Vanilla Cream.

Last year, a number of people asked me if I had a Carrot Cake so this year I decided to make one and it was The Surprise Hit of TSWCS!!!

Who knew that out of all the super-enticing sweet-treats the Carrot Cake would sell out first?! Possibly, it was because of the addition of the trademark Silver Whimsy mini-flags, but who knows? All I do know is that I had to make another one at 10pm on Saturday night because it had been so popular! The My Little Ponies (Lickety Split and Baby Bonnet) helped to sell the Scrummy Chocolate Brownies and enjoyed frolicking on the pink lace table cloth of Whimsy.

All in all, 'twas a fabulous weekend (made all the more special by visits to TSWCS by the wondrous Lara and Dan) and a marvellous festival of general community madness. I was very excited and also quite nervous that The Kitchen Table (West Hampstead's best cafe) and Walnut (West Hampstead's finest restaurant) tasted my meringues, and was very happy that they both enjoyed them! Hooray!

I might have a little bit of a baking break for now so, until next time, kisses and cakes from

Silver Whimsy x

PS Once again enormous gratitude to Dave Emery for allowing me to use his fabulous photographs x x x