Great Bloggers Bake Off: Victoria sponge inspired cupcakes

To coincide with the Great British Bake Off, two bloggers, Jenny of Mummy Mishaps and Helen of The Crazy Kitchen have come up with The Great Bloggers Bake off!

Week one on GBBO was a Victoria sandwich, an angel food cake and a chocolate show stopper. Angel cake, I’ve never heard of and at the same time, I’m not great with getting large cakes to rise! So I decided to bake some Victoria sponge inspired cupcakes.

Sponge recipe
I used a traditional recipe of weighing three eggs, and using the same weight of butter, sugar and flour. I mix the butter and eggs first, in a food processor. Then I add the eggs. Finally I sift in the flour with a tablespoon of cold milk and a few drops of vanilla extract.

I put the mixture into cupcake cases (not fairy cake cases – those are smaller)  and baked for twenty minutes at 170 degrees fan assisted.

Buttercream
I nearly always use buttercream for icing as it’s just so easy to make. Take these three ingredients and mix them together for ten seconds in a food processor!
150g Butter
300g Icing sugar
2 tbsp cold milk

Décor
Instead of removing the cupcakes from their cases, to cut them in half and sandwich them, I decided to use a special little cake gadget, which removes the middle of the cake, in a neat little circle (Obviously you then eat the middles!). In the middle of the cake, you then put a tiny amount of jam, and fill up with buttercream, finishing with a neat little piped flower shape. I then dusted a little icing sugar over the top for effect.

I also made some chocolate ones and put some food colouring in the icing, to give it a different look. The good thing about these cakes, is people think the icing is just on the top; until they bite in and find the surprise in the middle!