Saturday's alternative cake

Not being quite sure how many people to expect to Matt, my husband's, birthday luncheon and knowing to expect two under 7 year olds I deceided to make another sponge to augment the black forest gateau. Time now pressing on I decided to go for the simplest sponge going. This is very pleasing mathematically:

For every egg you use:

• 50g of butter / butter substitute 
• 50g sugar
• 50g self raising flour

It is also very pleasing in terms of simplicity. You just put it all in a bowl together mix it up a bit with a spoon and then whisk it all together with the electric beaters (you only have to mix it up a bit with a spoon first if you don't want the ingredients to fly everywhere, you can omit that step if you don't mind a lot of splattering). I started off with 3 eggs (and 150g of everything else) but once this was whisked decided that it would insufficient for 12 fairy cakes and 1 round sponge so added another egg (and another 50g of everything else). I also added a few drops of vanilla extract (this protects against it tasting too eggy) and a splash of milk to loosen everything up.

Then I spooned it into my cases. I was particularly excited to be making fairy cakes as I'd got some rather attractive new fairy cake cases (I chose to use red stripy ones today). It cooks at 180˚C until golden brown, confirmed by skewer test. The time depends on the size of the cake so the fairy cakes took about 20 minutes and the larger sponge about 25.

I was not about to go doing anything fancy with these cakes - I had had enough of that with the gateau and I thought I should leave them fairly simple for people with more of a delicate pallet. I cut the big round cake in half and sandwiched it together with cherry jam. This would go with the spare chocolate cake that I had sandwiched together with chocolate hazelnut spread to create the effect of one whole cake.

I intended to make butterfly cakes with the small ones, but instead of using butter icing I would use lemon curd. Unfortunately when I came to deploy the lemon curd I found that there was considerably less left than when I last opened the jar. So instead I used various preserves that I found in the fridge and made 3 of each of:

• lemon curd
• loganberry jam
• cranberry and orange jam
• gooseberry jam

(all preserves courtesy of my mum)

I constructed a cake stand (doilies and all) and we were good to go.

Jammy butterfly cake

An array of cakes

I must say that this good basic sponge was much more to my taste than the gateau - much less rich but equally (in my opinion) delicious - helped almost certainly by the vanilla extract which meant that it didn't taste eggy at all.