My first recipe from The Royal Touch, written by Carolyn Robb
Mile High Mini Victoria Sandwich Cakes. Look how tempting that picture is. Fresh strawberries, whipped cream with cake! Who can resist.
I wanted to try a Victoria sponge again but by a different chef and there just happened to be one in this book! I know, it’s not quite the same since these are basically little cupcakes, but I figured I would give it a try.
If you missed my previous test of Victoria Sponge, you can find it here.
I always like to read the entire recipe through a few times before I attempt them. With this recipe, and all the ones in this book, there are little asterisks beside a few of the ingredients. This means check the glossary at the back.
I am familiar with caster sugar from before so that one I didn’t need to look up. In Canada, I have found Castor Sugar as super fine sugar. But this recipe calls for “golden caster sugar”. I can’t say I have ever found golden super fine sugar so a quick check of the glossary, and as it turns out, I could make my own. I just needed to use my food processor to make demerara sugar finer than how it comes out of the package.
This recipe calls for the butter and sugar to be creamed together. Easy enough with the stand mixer. Sift in the dry ingredients, stir until just combined and scoop into greased muffin tins.
I was a little concerned with how there didn’t seem to be much batter to spread evenly between 12 muffin tins. When I looked at the recipe picture again though, it didn’t seem like the “cakes” were that big either without all the filing.
Yeah, not very tall. And I, of course, had domes on top of each one. The recipe doesn’t say anything about domes so I left them on and just used strawberries and whipped cream to deal with it.
While the cakes were cooling, it was time to make the filing. There is twice as much whipped cream as the Paul Hollywood recipe I made a couple of weeks ago. This was a good start for me! I love whipped cream.
I sliced the cakes in half and began the assembly. I checked three different grocery stores as well as 1 garden centre and did not find fresh mint when I was getting all the ingredients to make this. I had fresh strawberries though, so I was not going to waste the fruit and wait for mint to show up. Go figure though, the next week the grocery store had lots of mint.
And the result….
What did I think? I liked it! The Victoria sponge was yummy, the fresh whipped cream and strawberries were great. I’m not sure if mint would have added to it but the next time I make it, I’ll add the mint. Both my husband and son liked it as well although my son would have preferred a more traditional cake shape instead of the cupcakes. My husband thought the taste and texture of this sponge was better than the Paul Hollywood version.
The recipe was easy to follow and I appreciated having both weight and volume measurements. Other than making my own golden caster sugar, the ingredients were pretty standard and no real special equipment was required. I have already picked out a few more recipes from the book to try at a later date. So far, I’m happy with this book purchase. You can check out my initial review of The Royal Touch here. If you would like to purchase this recipe book, you can find it here.
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Do you own this recipe book? Have you tried this recipe before or would you? I would love to hear what you think. Leave a comment down below or if you make it, tag me over on instagram so I can see how your mini cakes turned out.
Whoa! Those look amazing! Thank you for showing all the steps and the great pictures. These just went on my list to try.