On Twitter I was pointed in the direction of @weeklybakeoff who is working their way through Mary Berry's 100 Cakes & Bakes book. Every week a recipe is selected and a number of bakers produce their version of the recipe and post photos. A judge is selected and must then choose the winner. It's lovely to see how differently the same recipe is interpreted and the little twists everyone adds to make it their own, or work-arounds because they didn't have exactly the right equipment or ingredients.
I was hoping to join in last week, but time just kind of passed me by. I had finished all of my cake on Friday and we had a nice quiet Saturday planned - a perfect opportuity for a spot of baking.
This week's challenge was the Farmhouse Orange Victoria Sandwich (page 28). I was quite unprepared, to be honest. I don't own any 7" round cake tins, so had to use my one 7" heart shaped tin twice. I didn't read the recipe properly and went on auto-pilot adding butter & caster sugar instead of muscavado, so had to start again, this time using soft light brown sugar as I didn't have any muscavado. Then when I peeled the greaseproof paper off I managed to bring with it some large chunks of cake. I also didn't have any mamalade. I tried making an orange syrup to use instead, but it didn't taste very orangey, so ended up borrowing from my mother-in-law. Luckily we had bought her some fancy mamalade when we went to Padstow from Rick Stein's shop, so I used a lovely grapefuit, orange and lemon mamalade.
All in all, it didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped, but it smells lovely and tastes good too.
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