Let us eat cake

In my book, you can't have a birthday without a slightly over the top cake to celebrate (as if anyone ever needed an excuse to eat cake anyway!). Since it was my wonderful Dad's birthday recently, I offered my services as the cake provider and decided to make one of my old favourite recipes.

If you took me to out for some cake, Victoria sponge wouldn't be my first choice. I'm usually persuaded by some kind of naughty chocolate treat, or something more unusual than the traditional Victoria sponge. However, this recipe stands out from the others. For me, it ticks all the boxes - its moist, full of flavour, great contrasting textures, and above all, looks fantastic. The difference between this recipe and others is the deliciously sweet vanilla mascapone and fromage frais and fresh raspberry filling, which it is also topped with rather than the usual dusting of icing sugar.

Before I go any further with the cake, can I just say, when I was picking up my ingredients from Waitrose, I got a little bit excited in the baking aisle. Just look!

This was just one section of THREE of baking and decorating goodies! They had a whole shelf dedicated just to different types of vanilla, all in gorgeous packaging. Baker's heaven!

For the sponge: 350g self raising flour
2 round tsp baking powder
6 large eggs
350g caster sugar
350g softened butter
1tsp vanilla extract

For the filling:
450g raspberries
4 tbs soft set rasperry jam
500g mascapone
400ml fromage frais
2 tbs caster sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
icing sugar for dusting

Pre heat oven to 170 degrees C

Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl. The large bit is important, this is quite a lot of cake mix and you'll struggle with all the mixing if the bowl is too small. Throw in the remaining sponge ingredients and mix together with hand whisk for about a minute.

 I love the ribbons made in the batter mix by the hand whisk.

Gently pour the batter into lined and lightly greased 9" tins and bake on the middle shelf for 35 minutes. Don't you dare open the oven door early to check on it's progress or you'll knock all of the air out of the sponge and end up with something very flat and sad looking. Take it out of the oven and let it cool before you attempt any form of assembly.

Layer up the jam, followed by the filling mixture of mascapone, fromage frais, vanilla, sugar and fresh raspberries.

The second layer of sponge can now be added, and on top of this, a few dollops of the cream mixture, which can be spread over the top of the cake to form a base for the loose raspberries to bond to (don't go too near to the edge, it looks nice to have a bit of a border going here.

Scatter the whole raspberries, and dust with icing sugar. Ta da!

The only other known improvement to this cake are candles :)