Madeira Cake

Baking large cakes can be a tricky experience, as few recipes are published for bigger sizes and simply doubling-up ingredients does not always produce the expected results! 

A good tip before committing all those expensive ingredients is to check the temperature in your oven. Many recipes fail because the built-in oven thermostat is not accurate. We recommend that you test the temperature with a simple oven thermometer, available from most good cookshops for a fraction of the price of the ingredients of a big cake. 

The following receipe was sent in to us by a domestic customer who has baked this cake successfully herself and was kind enough to share her method with our other customers - with thanks to Jen Aldred.

(Cooking time 65 mins)

Use: Silverwood 12 x 4 inch Square Cake Tin, Loose Base

Ingredients:

825 gm Butter

825 gm Self Raising Flour

825 gm Caster Sugar

12 Large Eggs

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 180 deg. (Gas Mark 4)

Grease and line the tin (Triple lining is best to prevent scorching).

Take a LARGE mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Then add the eggs, one at a time to prevent curdling (you may need to add a little flour from time to time). Once the eggs are mixed in, fold in the balance of the flour.

Cook for 30 minutes at 180 deg. then cover with baking parchment for another 20 minutes at the same temperature. For the final 15 minutes, keep covered but reduce the temperature to 170 deg. (Gas 3).

This should produce a cake that has a close, even texture, is completely cooked and moist.

To adapt for chocolate cake: (with thanks to Lorna Shannon)

Substitute 3 desert spoons of good cocoa powder for 3 desert spoons of flour. Add a further 2 heaped desert spoons of cocoa powder.

You can substitute 200gm of the butter for Flora to make it lighter. This should result in a bouncy, good textured chocolate sponge. Finished off with a dark chocolate ganache, sprinkled with white chocolate shavings, it is quite a treat!

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