I chose a recipe with the help of my friend Camaryn, it gives a very impressive 4 layer cake which will be filled with cheesecake frosting and passion fruit and decorated with flowers. Perfect. As I only have a little oven I had to make the sponges one at a time, I'm also one of those people who beats everything by hand as I don't have a food processor or kitchen aid. So on Saturday I made a point of buying a nice posh large wooden spoon which I thought would be perfect to help with my mixing. I split the ingredients in half and beat together my first sponge, its was quite hard as it was a lot of mixture.
It had been in the oven for perhaps 5 minutes and I was licking the spoon testing out the recipe of course when i noticed a good notch in my spoon, I stared at it for a while before screaming naughty words. Yes the notch wasn't there when I started cooking, which meant the notch of wood was somewhere in the cake. Crap. I stared in disbelief at the oven for a few minutes weighing up my options. Option one, leave it in the cake and warn people that if they get a hard piece, if could be part of the spoon, option 2 try and find it, option 3 make a new cake. Option 1 was out, there was no way I could make a birthday cake and announce over dinner that there might be a small piece of wood in the cake. I can picture people now, fork with cake mid-air not wanting to eat but not wanting to be rude. Option 3 - not that I'm stingy but with the 8 eggs in this cake, I wasn't up for going back to the shops to get more ingredients to make more cake. Option 2 seemed like my only option.
I got my now very liquid cake out of the oven, the mixture was only mildly warm, now, do I dive straight in with my hands? Well I'm figuring its not gonna be that easy so I take out the metal sieve and start spoon the gloopy mixture and creaming it back into a bowl with a spatula. After removing half of the mixture, hey presto one piece of wood. Right mixture back into the cake tin and back into the oven, fortunately it was quite a lot of mixture for one tin so I was hoping I wouldn't have lost too much height.
Once the first sponge was out of the over I started to work on the second sponge which went without too much fuss, compared to the first sponge it was higher, but not too bad. I decided to leave the filling to the next day as I wanted it to be fresh.
I got up bright and early on Sunday and started to make my filling, first I made the passion fruit syrup, which went without any problems. Then I moved onto the cream cheese filling, I don't know what happened but for some reason my filling went very runny, almost the consistency of cream. I had followed the recipe exactly so was very confused, I checked the blog, no mention of a runny topping. I stared hopelessly at it, I tried adding more icing sugar which didn't help, I had no option but to use it as time was running out.
I cut the sponges and spread some mixture onto the first sponge and then dotted over some of the syrup, I spread a little on top of the other sponge and carefully put them together, not too bad, the filling stayed inside. I moved onto the next bit and as I spread filling onto the top of the stacked sponges the mixture started to ooze out of the bottom one. It didn't get any better as I layered the next to sponges and by the time it was finished instead of a beautiful and impressive layered caked I had a tall and messy cake which quite frankly looked as if a child had filled it. I was gutted. I hate taking something i have created which is anything but perfect.
In the end the cake went down very well, it had a beautiful lemony flavour and wasn't too heavy, it actually got better the day after as the cheese cake filling had soaked into the sponge, I would happily make this recipe again but would add the sour cream bit by bit to avoid a sloppy filling.
I decorate the cake with Singapore orchids which took the emphasis off the messy layers of sponge. You can find this recipe from Homelife.com
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