Victoria's Victoria Sponge

The star cupcake in the ‘Women’s Institute’ Collection I’m creating for this summer’s fetes will have to be the Victoria sponge. I’ve been developing this recipe in honour of our friend Victoria who recently had baby Lucy, hence the double Victorias.

There has been much tinkering with the basic vanilla sponge recipe as this one will really have to stand up on its own and needs to be both light and moist. I think the old trick of weighing your eggs and using equal quantities of butter, sugar and flour has had the best results. As well as good quality vanilla (of course), I think that good quality (well beaten) unsalted butter is a must, but then I do love my butter as anyone who knows me well will testify!

With the sponge is wrapped up I’ve finally Victoria’d it by adding jam inside the sponge and whipped cream on top. Yes, jam in the middle really does work! It’s a bit of a faff as you need to be careful to seal the jam in the sponge mix while also keeping a good amount of cake mix underneath (because it sinks). The first ones I tried were with cherry jam (because the jar was open!), which was fine, but for traditional Victoria Sponge taste, the ones pictured contain raspberry jam. I’m hoping a seedless raspberry jelly may be better behaved and sink less – that and better cream presentation are my next tweaks.

I hope Victoria likes them!