A nice light basic sponge cake that actually rises? Recipes or tips please.

[franch]

Not really a cake-maker but made DD1's birthday cake this week - a basic Victoria sandwich. Ended up re-making it with double the ingredients when the first attempt looked more like a couple of pancakes. It was quite nice actually but I'd like to learn to make a lovely light fluffy one as both the DDs have many birthdays to come ....

buy two really good quality deep sided sandwich pans for a start

done

any other tips? do i just need magic fingers?

add some baking powder (a tsp or two) and a few tbsp of milk!

were you doing a standard 3 egg cake?

you can buy special sponge flour... have no idea what is different from self raising... but it is fab! makes cakes nice and light and fluffy.
i always add a dash of water too... helps for somer eason.

erm... make sure your oven is WELL preheated so nice and hot when you put cakes in.

basically, I used to spend ages whisking the butter lovely and soft until I realised I was wasting my time!

Now I measure all the ingredients out -
3 eggs (should be room temperature - stops the mixture curdling)
6oz flour
6oz caster sugar
6oz butter (sofened slightly in microwave)
a drop of vanilla essence (if doing plain cake) 1 1/2 tsp of baking powder

and mix them all together in bowl. Bung in the oven (180C) and take out when risen nicely and fork goes in and comes out clean (my oven takes around 20mins but is fan assisted).

Use your eggs as your base weight.

Weigh eggs in shells. Use exactly same amount of flour, csater sugar and butter. I.e. if total weight of eggs = 116g, then use 116g butter which you cream with 116g sugar. Add eggs and fold in 116g flour. Drop of milk might help.

Make sue oven is properly pre-heated and you put in centre of oven (or wherever oven manufacturer recommends for cooking spnges)

should also say, use 7inch tins for that cake recipe

One of the best and easiest cake recipe books I ever bought was Mary Berry's Ultimate Cake Book. It has everything from the most simple cake to some really tricky (but delicious) ones. It has the lemon drizzle cakes and lots of ideas for tray bakes etc (with lots of pictures to see what it is supposed to look like!). Well worth the money and definitely my favourite cake book.

Delia's all in one- you can't go wrong! Make sure tins are the right size.

Thanks all. The recipe I used was:

100g each of butter, caster sugar, SR flour
2 eggs

Cream butter & sugar; beat in eggs a little at a time; fold in flour. Bake 190C - 15 mins.

Used a 20cm tin instead of an 18cm one first time round (oops), but it was OK with 1.5 times the ingredients above - just could do better. Will follow tips below next time

Interesting that you'd use 1.5 times my ingredients with an 18cm (7in) tin fox - makes sense.

Good tip robinpud - just checked out the Delia recipe and I see it's the same as mine except it also has baking powder and there are some useful tips like getting the air in when sifting the flour and using an electric whisk (which I did wonder about). Thanks

alwyas put in a nice pinch of baking powder!