Level 2 Chi Kung.

Having felt too ill to bake yesterday, it was now or never for the second tier of Katie’s cake. She had specified that one layer should be chocolate and the other Victoria Sponge. I’ve never made a Victoria Sponge – I’ve never quite forgiven it for not being a real (i.e. cream) sponge! But Katie, born in this country, sees nothing wrong with it. No shortage of recipes for the benighted stuff so I went for Delia’s version. I had to make a treble mixture to get the size required. Slight panic when I discovered we were almost out of baking powder, but I managed to dredge up the baking soda / cream of tartar conversion on google. I followed the recipe exactly, adding the beaten eggs a teaspoonful at a time, sieving the flour in from a great height – all the typical (and usually unnecessary) Delia faff. The mixture looked fine, rose up nicely and went a nice colour. Given that it was a treble mixture, I wasn’t expecting it to be cooked in 25 minutes but 45 minutes came and went it was still very wobbly. Then right at the last minute, the damn thing sank in the middle. Arrrgh! No time (or inclination frankly) to make another, so once it was cooled, Nick simply cut the raised edges off. This had the advantage that we could taste the off cuts and, to my enormous surprise, it tasted great!