Mini Victoria Sponges

Some friends of ours got married recently and asked me if I would makes the wedding cakes. Of course I said yes, I would be thrilled to. And that's about where the simplicity stopped. It was a week of catastrophes but I will highlight the main ones for you.

The order was for a traditional fruit cake and then miniature victoria sponges. 140 of them. The fruit cake was done well in advance and all went to plan. The sponges, not so much.

I bought a new set of mini tins for the purpose as I thought it would be easier, neater and more cost effective than making a tray bake and cutting them out. The tray holds 16 mini cakes. I was unsure of quantities so I used the recipe for one victoria sponge to see how that worked out for me. The tins were about 2/3rds full so when I put them in I was worried about them rising enough to fill the tins. This is what happened...

Woohoo! I thought to myself. Perfect, I can just lop the tops off them and they will be just ideal.

But then this happened...

Not so ideal. But not the end of the world because they looked like they were rescue-able. So I took them out of the tins. And then this happened...

Have you ever seen such a strange shaped cake? They hadn't 'risen' in the middle. Or they had shrunk in the middle. I have no idea what happened but they were certainly not useable!

I baked a whole sponge to cut mini ones out of but that also failed and so I went back to what I know best. Cupcakes. I boshed out 12 dozen cupcakes in a couple of days. I took them out of their cases, cut them in half, piped buttercream (fresh cream would have spoiled) and spooned jam into the middle and put the tops on. I then put them into fresh cases. You would never have known that they started life as cupcakes, they turned out as perfect little victoria sponges. I had piped 200 (to allow for breakages) white chocolate hearts onto parchment. I piped an extra blob of buttercream on the top of each cake and stood a heart in it.

This was the final outcome

LESSON LEARNED: Do not leave your mixer running when breaking eggs into the cake batter. It will only end in tears - while you mustn't cry over split milk you are very much entitled to cry over beaten eggs, shell and all.

HINT AND TIP: If a small piece of egg shell falls into somewhere you don't want it, use the remainder of the shell to fish it out. It will cut through the white better than any spoon or utensil.