The Great Cake Challenge

In a previous life I was a prolific baker. This was in the mid-1990s, long before the financial crisis and the rise in popularity of home baking. People watched Friends, The Bill and Sex and the City, not the Great British Bake-off or Sewing Bee. In the 1990s things could only get better. We never saw the financial crisis coming, we’d survived the 1970s and 15% interest rates of the 1980s, but the Great Recession of 2008 was waiting around the corner. From the fanfare of the Millennium followed a period of my life in which I moved house eleven times in ten years. Each time I encountered different ovens with varying degrees of reliability. I stopped baking and it was only by a narrow margin that I decided to bring the majority of my large collection of cake tins to France. In the three years that we have been here full time I’ve only made a couple of boiled fruit cakes, so addictive that we’d eat most before they were completely cooled from the tin, a habit that our waistlines could not support.

One of the animal rescue organisations close to my heart here is the Twilight Retirement Home for Old Dogs. I’ve been helping to sort out donations of bric-a-brac, and it was whilst taking a break from an afternoon’s hot and dusty sorting that conversation turned to a forthcoming Open Day. My ears pricked up when someone said that they needed cakes. With the rejuvenation of my cooking mojo, here was something that I might be able to do. I’d never baked a cake in our new gas oven, so I agreed that if my trial run proved successful I’d bake some ‘traditional English cakes’ for afternoon teas.

The first thing to sort out was equipment. Luckily I’d still got a shelf full of assorted tins and some bowls. Not my lovely Mason & Cash Cane mixing bowl, though that was soon rectified, thanks Amazon. Despite a thorough search I couldn’t locate my trusty Moulinex hand mixer and OH admitted that it had probably fallen victim to a dechetterie run. I fixed that on  a trip to Carrefour where I picked up the latest Moulinex mixer for €20, plus baking paper and the obligatory doylies.

The next problem was ingredients. I had a root around in the dresser and found both bicarbonate of soda and baking powder, use by date 2014 – destination Bin. The flour I had bought more recently for dusting fried goats cheese was moving, despite keeping it in a plastic box (weevils) – destination Bin. I checked out the translations of the most common ingredients and took a trip to SuperU with my list: self-raising flour (farine de gateaux), plain flour (farine de ble), baking powder (levure chimique), and bicarbonate of soda (bicarbonate de soudre). Easy enough. The ‘fat’ element turned out to be the more problematic. In the UK, I had always used Stork and Trex for all cake and pastry recipes; both types of margarine specifically for baking. Butter was reserved strictly for butter cream. I wasn’t able to identify anything similar to Stork, so I bought a couple of different products to try, including ‘Astra’ a block margarine advertised as specifically for cuisson, and a block of the cheapest unsalted butter I could find.

The first mix was a complete failure. The Astra refused to cream with the sugar and curdled as soon as the eggs were added. The result was a horrible sticky gloop that looked like lumpy custard. I didn’t bother to waste gas by trying to cook it, and it went straight into the bin. Not one to give in, I knocked up a second mix with the butter and this looked more like the cake mixture of old. Half an hour in the oven and I’d got two beautifully risen seven-inch Victoria sponge cakes. Fortunately there was enough butter left to make some butter icing and sandwich the two halves together with strawberry jam. My first French Victoria sponge cake was born – it didn’t last long, but it did pass the taste test. Now I just need to make a few dozen more.