Victoria sponge with pastry cream and berries and cherries. I like the Victoria sponge recipe from Michael Smith’s The Afternoon Tea Book. The WorldCat record has no cover image, so I linked the title to Google Book – but there’s no handy recipe preview, and I have also used this Saveur recipe, which is available online. Either way, it’s such a better recipe for the Maryann pan than the plum cake (without the plums) from Dorie Greenspan that I tried the first time, much as I usually love Dorie’s recipes.
Which is not to say that the baking wasn’t kind of a comedy of errors – late afternoon Sunday, and I was trying to be in a hurry, because the honored dad, Mark, wanted to bike down to the Union Terrace and enjoy the lake. The outlet the mixer plugs into was dead. In my kitchen, the outlets with reset buttons are every other one, but the one to the right didn’t do it. I went in the basement and tried tripping every circuit breaker labelled “kitchen”, but that was no help either. So I mixed up the cake using a different outlet, and it wasn’t until it was in the oven and I was wiping the counter that I realized the re-setting outlet was to the left, hiding behind the coffee maker plugged into it.
I dropped the butter and had to trim off half the stick that got polluted with dirt and cat hair, and I forgot that I was out of sugar, so I made brown sugar pastry cream – that I was a little afraid might be lumpy, but wasn’t, and was delicious with the berries, too. The cake’s also served the purpose of sporting some really nice pictures on my blog – and click here for the recipe.
