Home made victoria sponge cake – Blognix bake off winner

I was gutted when Marks and Spencer discontinued their individual triple layer Victoria sponge cake.  At £1.90 a slice, it really was a little slice of heaven.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the same quality as a lot of the shop sponges seem to have a lot of air pumped into them, so I have started to make my own sponges….yum. Home made cake is definitely better value and more delicious than shop bought varieties. And to prove that home made is best, I won the Blognix bake off with my cake last weekend.

The total cost for a whole cake is £2.43 and the ingredient cost breakdown is below. Of course, I couldn’t buy just 200 grams of flour etc, so the ingredients cost me £6.80, including the vanilla essence which is optional, in total, but you can make ar0und four cakes with the left over ingredients, just need to buy more butter. I got all the ingredients from Aldi.

Sponge

200 g self raising flour 6 p (45 p for pack)

200 g caster sugar 21 p (£1.05 for pack)

200 g butter 76 p (95 p for pack)

4 eggs 59 p (89 p for 6)

Baking powder 2 p (69 p for tub)

Filling

50 g butter  19 p

100 g icing sugar 16 p (79 p for pack)

200 g jam 43 p (99 per jar)

Vanilla extract 1 p (99 p for bottle)

The method is so easy:

Pre-heat oven to 170 (fan), line and grease with butter a couple of sponge tins (I got some silicon ones for £1 each from Poundland), soften the butter, mix all ingredients in to a smooth batter, put in tins and bake for 20 mins until spongy.

Remove from oven, cool. Mix softened butter with icing sugar (slowly), put on cake, smoother jam on top, sandwich top layer on, dust with icing sugar, et voila.