Nigella's Birthday Custard Sponge - Supersized!

Another birthday cake, my mother-in-law's this time. As I still wasn't feeling well I wanted to make something I had already done before to minimise chances of Bad Things Happening. I made this for my son's 5th birthday earlier in the year and had been looking for an excuse to make it again, it really is gorgeous.

BIRTHDAY CUSTARD SPONGE CAKE

200g plain flour
3 tablespoons Bird’s custard powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
4 eggs
225g soft butter
200g caster sugar
2-3 tablespoons milk

Make sure everything you need is at room temperature before you start. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180C, and butter and line two 20cm sandwich tins.

Put all of the above ingredients except the milk into a food processor. Process to a smooth batter, and then add the milk a tablespoon at a time to make a soft dropping consistency. Divide between the two cake tins and bake for 20 minutes. The cakes will have risen and feel spookily puffy; this is because of the cornflour in the custard powder.

Let the tins sit on a cooling rack for 5 minutes and then turn them out on to the rack peeling away the paper.

For the buttercream filling:

125g icing sugar
4 teaspoons Bird’s custard powder
75g soft unsalted butter
1 ½ teaspoons boiling water

Process the icing sugar and custard powder to get rid of any lumps, and then add the butter, processing again to make the buttercream come together. Feed the boiling water down the funnel with the motor running to make the filing easier to spread. Then sandwich the cooled sponges together with the custardy buttercream.

For the chocolate icing:

60ml water
2 tablespoons golden syrup
125g caster sugar (or use 50g if using milk chocolate)
175g dark chocolate
1 pot hundreds and thousands

Combine the water, sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan, stirring to dissolve over a low heat. Let it come to the boil and take it off the heat.

Break up the chocolate into small pieces if you are not using chocolate buttons and then add to the pan, swirling it around to cover in the hot liquid. Leave to melt for a few minutes, and then whisk the icing to make it smooth and shiny. Pour over the buttercream filled cake, letting it drip down the sides, and then sprinkle generously with the hundreds and thousands before the icing sets.

Prong with candles, light them and sing!

Now I don't know if it's because my processor was still objecting strongly to having an orange to squish up for the muffins but I had a bit of a disaster with the first layer. I made up one whole quantity and put it in a 10" sqaure tin, it did the whole 'spookily puffy' thing which is quite scary as they do go quite big but settle once they are out of the oven. Anyhow, mine settled and it had big huge dents in it! I'm sure I mixed it for long enough. I was going to do it all again but I only had the 8 eggs needed for the cake so had to put up with it as it was. I wasn't chancing it going wrong for the top layer and did it with the hand mixer instead. As you can see from the pic it is way better than the first and had a lot better texture. The sponge is very light and it is quite tricky to get it out of the tin withough damaging the sides of it so I left it to cool for longer too.For the buttercream I made double the amount from the original recipe but stuck to the original for the chocolate topping as it made loads last time and it was all running all over the cake board. I left it to cool this time and spread it on with a spatula, I just can't do the decorative 'running down the sides' thing. As always I had a cake frill to hand, I'm getting very predictable!

This is the one I made for my son, I decorated it with white and milk chocolate buttons.