VALENTINE'S DAY CAKE

How about making a heart shape cake for sharing and one that is perhaps a little too pink, topped with lots of butter cream. I bought the shimmer sprinkles and silver dragees from Sainsbury's (these were made by Supercook) and planned the cake around them. The cake is simply a three egg Victoria sponge mix.

We had a family wedding yesterday morning and lunchtime was spent at the bride and groom's house for snacks and cakes before we had a 'bit of a do' in the evening for the wedding reception. As cake is my domain, I baked three quite simple cakes to take along. Everyone seemed to enjoy them and I thought I would share the cakes with you. I made the heart shape cake, a Bakewell cake and an iced lemon drizzle cake.


Cherry Bakewell cake from the February 2009 BBC GoodFood Magazine tasted as wonderful as it looked. The only alteration to the original recipe was I used Bonne Maman Raspberry Conserve instead of the suggested morello cherry conserve. If you like Bakewell Tart then you will love this.


I topped a lemon drizzle cake with butter cream and a few pastel coloured dragees. Use any lemon drizzle cake recipe, but for the 'drizzle' you will need to make a lemon syrup by placing into a small saucepan 25g caster sugar and the juice of one lemon, heat gently to dissolve the caster sugar into the lemon juice, simmer until syrupy. Prick the cake all over when it comes out of the oven and carefully spoon over the hot lemon syrup. Leave in the tin until the cake is cold before turning out.

It's perhaps best to line the cake tin first with baking parchment so that you can just lift the cake out of the tin - it makes life easier. The buttercream was made with unsalted butter, otherwise the buttercream is just too sickly.

Followers of my blog might like to pop over to read a piece by Becky Hogge who has written an article for the NewStatesman called Recipes for Twitters. Becky has given my humble blog a little mention!