Basic Cake Recipe

 My first post! I've been meaning to start a blog for ages, so here I am!
This blog is basically to share recipes, photos and my experiences of baking. I've been reading baking blogs for a couple of years now and I think they are brilliant, I usually get recipes off other people's blogs instead of actual chefs! It's just so good to see step-by-step photo's and the opinions of bakers, rather than just a recipe. So hopefully people will enjoy my blog just as much as I enjoy theirs.

 My first post is going to be my favourite cake recipe - the simple sponge recipe. My mum taught me this recipe when I was young, and it's so easy to remember that it's just stuck in my mind since then. My boyfriend makes fun of me for using ounces instead of grams, (stuck in the olden days:P) but this recipe is just so easy to remember in ounces. The recipe below makes a tray of large cupcakes (so 12 cupcakes). But you can change it to meet your needs. So a 2 egg recipe will make 6 cakes, etc.

Basic Cake Recipe

4 eggs

8 oz Self Raising Flour

8 oz Caster Sugar

8 oz Margarine.

Basically, the amount of eggs you use, you just double that for the number of ounces of the other ingredients. So simple!

First off, measure both the marg and the sugar in a bowl and whisk them together.

It should be nice and fluffy when whisked.

Add the eggs.

 Whisk so it's nice and fluffy again.

 Add the flour, and mix slowly with a spoon or on a low speed setting if you have a stand mixer. It's important to mix slowly so that you don't knock out all the air in your cakes. I've added cocoa to my mix here, because I'm making chocolate ganache for the topping. See my later post for instructions to make chocolate ganache! I usually add about 3 tablespoons of cocoa, but you can add any amount you want. I didn't make these cupcakes overly chocolatey because of the rich topping.

 Spoon the mixture into cupcake cases. Try and make them as even as possible - although I always fail at this!

 Bake for 20-25 minutes, until they spring back when you touch them. I usually stick a fork through a couple, if it comes out clean they're done. If it comes out with wet mixture, bake for a few minutes longer.

And there you have it, the basic cake recipe. I hope you find my instructions useful. I will be doing more complex recipes as well as cake decorating tutorials as I continue with this blog, but I thought I'd start off simple for the first post. Thanks for reading!


Liddie
xxxx