Welcome back to Week 2 of Did I Bake That?!
This week’s recipe was the chocolate Victoria sandwich! A traditional Victoria sandwich is two vanilla sponge cakes with raspberry or strawberry jam between the layers. I, however, am a lover of chocolate, so I decided to skip the traditional and coffee versions and go straight for the chocolate (you’ll find as we go through these recipes that I often took creative liberty and chose the chocolate variations, ha-ha!).
The first thing I’d like to point out – so you all won’t make the same mistake – is that you need to set out your butter to soften rather early. The last two weeks I’ve been completely ready to bake (oven on, ingredients set out, scale ready), but then I realize I didn’t set out the butter. I usually let it soften until you can easily stick a knife or a finger through it and it cuts through (pun definitely intended) smooth as butter.
The second thing is, this recipe called for a few teaspoon and tablespoon measurements! Yay! Something I’m familiar with, ha-ha!
The first step of the recipe was a new experience for me. Usually with chocolate cakes you just add the cocoa powder in with the rest of the ingredients when you’re mixing it together. This recipe, however, had me combine two tablespoons of cocoa powder together with three tablespoons of boiling water, let it cool, then add the rest of the ingredients and mix. This was the only aspect of chocolate in the entire recipe, so I was interested to see what kind of flavor that resulted in.
Now, going back to the butter not being soft enough, I realized when mixing my batter that there were still tiny chunks of butter. I tried mixing it on a higher speed to try to break them up, but I didn’t want to overmix the batter, so I decided to keep the butter chunks and hope for the best. The recipe said to divide the mixture evenly in the two pans and I, like the perfectionist I am, tried to use the scale and get it exactly even. However, half way through I decided eye-balling it worked just as well!
The cakes went into the oven (180 degrees Celsius ~ 350 degrees Fahrenheit) for 25 minutes, and, learning my lesson from last time with the drier cake, I checked the cakes at 20 minutes. To my dismay, not only were they not done yet, but they had sunk in the middle again! I know baking at a high elevation can mess with your results, but I’m going to sit down this next week and research how to adjust the recipe, whether it be flour, baking soda, etc. to avoid sinkage in future recipes.
In last week’s recipe, the Madeira cake, it said to flip the cakes over in their tins while cooling to let gravity help with the sunken middle, so I decided to try it with this cake too. This… did not work… ha-ha! Instead of gravity helping, it just made the cakes sink the other way! So, no matter what I did with these cakes, there was going to be a big dip in the middle.
Now that my cakes were cooling, I started on the frosting. The frosting, like most, was pretty simple. Butter, icing sugar, milk. I mixed these together, but it turned out really chunky and dry, so I added one more tablespoon of milk, and that worked beautifully! I mixed it for approx. one minute total and it turned out nice and fluffy. I don’t know how you all like your cake/frosting ratio, but I like quite a bit of frosting, and this recipe didn’t make much. I would definitely double the frosting recipe next time I make this.
Once I decorated the cake, I was again disappointed by the huge dip in the middle, but if this process has taught me anything in the past two weeks, it’s that you can only laugh off the mishaps and the flavor matters the most! The cake was really moist, definitely moister than last week, and it had a slight carrot cake texture (sans carrot pieces, of course). It was the faintest chocolate taste I’ve ever experienced in a cake, and while I still prefer a richer chocolate flavor, I found myself wanting another piece! Next time, I might try to play with the amount of cocoa powder at the beginning to add a little extra oomph when it comes to the chocolate flavor.
Overall, I’d give this recipe a 4/5 for simplicity, and even though I wanted more chocolate flavor, it was still pretty great! I decided I'm not going to take points off for mishaps with elevation and sinkage.
My goal for this next week is to research baking tips at high elevations, and kick next week’s recipe’s butt!
That’s it for week two, the chocolate Victoria sandwich! Thank you for following along with me, and if you have any questions, feel free to use the “Get in Touch” feature on my “About Me” page and subscribe to get updates on posts!
See you next week!
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