I want to be a person who bakes cakes

[PeaMcLean]

I envy people who can just whip a cake together with no effort.

Please can you give me your easiest recipes, preferably just chuck it in and stir it together, if such a thing exists.

I don't have a food processor and find creaming the sugar and butter a real faff, but I hear there are cakes which don't require this. [hopeful]

I also want straightforward ingredients, ie the kind you reallly do find in your cupboard rather than having to go and buy something specially, then you use one drop, and the remains sit there for ever more.

Does such a recipe exist???

Delia's How To Cook has a very easy beginners' Victoria sponge recipe.
Ingredients:
6oz self raising flour
6oz very soft butter
6oz castor sugar
3 large eggs
1 tsp baking power
half tsp vanilla extract.
Basically you bung it all in a big bowl, whisk for a couple of minutes till it's nice and smooth, put it in two baking tins and bake for half an hour on gas mark 3 (170c) in the centre of the oven.
Take out, cool, add filling/icing/whatever.
It really is very easy. I wasn't a baker till I discovered this recipe. Now I make all kinds of cakes.

Victoria sponges are best made with a whisk. There are some cakes like a boiled fruit cake or gingerbread that can be made with very little stirring - also muffins which are supposed to be much better if you stir them very little.

Try this one.

Yes, cakes with little stirring sounds good! Whisks = hard work.

You can stir with a wooden spoon with my recipe.

Mars Lemon Drizzle is spectacularly easy to make, you just put all the ingredients in and mix, takes no time at all and tastes lovely.

TBH, I tend to mostly chuck all the ingredients in at once and I've not had many failures. I can do without multiple bowls to wash up.

My top tip is using those cake liner things from lakeland

here they are great

and take lots of the faffing on out of proceedings

and I have got these scales which you put the bowl you are using to mix your cake in on the scales which has also made my life much easier.

I make muffins - the easiest form of cake - just mix it up. I have been recc a book called 'fast and fantastic muffins' by s reimer.
Banana and raisen loaf is the kind of thing you have the ingredients for and is just mixing - google a recipe.

Get a kenwood mixer, they knock the cakes together so quickly! I'd be lost without mine.

Mary Berry's cake book is excellent, I still use my mother's 1970 "Bero cookbook"!!!!
Nigella Lawson has a few good recipies but some of them are a real faff.

My sponge recipie is:
weigh 3 eggs (with shells on)
Whatever they weigh you need the smae amount of sugar, butter and flour.
Cream sugar with butter (using kenwood mixer)
Add the eggs (now minus shells)one at a time
Add vanilla extract, give it a good whizz
Add the flour and whizz slowly until flour just incorporated
Put in 7 inch non stick tins (from Lakeland) and bake on gas 4 in centre of oven.

Good filling/topping is to melt 1 oz butter with 2 tablespooons of water then stir into icing sugar and top the cake.
Yum yum.

Really? I'd automatically assumed it was a "cream the butter with the sugar then beat to within an inch of its life or else your cake will FAIL" one.

I'm not confident with sponges, can you tell??? I will try yours though Lyra, I can manage a wooden spoon.

Gosh you're all quick! That last one was re mar's Lemon Drizzle Cake.

With the lemon drizzel cake, where the recipe says "lined tin" is that one of those rectangular ones? i've got 2 round 7inch tins. Will that do?

I do the lemon drizzle in 2 ways, sometimes I put it in a roasting tin, a rectangular one and line the whole thing and then pull the lining out.

Sometimes I make it as a sandwich, in 2 round tins, and then I add a buttercream filling, which I make with 200g icing sugar and 100g butter with a little lemon juice or essence, with the normal drizzle on top.

Pea, Mars's LDC is a biggun so I guess you will have to split the mix between both your tins.

You may be making the first LDC VSC. Hey you could whip up some cream and add some lemon curd for the filling

that is a bloody brilliant idea btw. Jeez I'm a complete and utter triumph on mn tonight. Monotremes and LDC/VSC [aka slubbers LDSC]

Oh and Mary Berry's book of cakes havs a whole chapter on tray bakes which are bung them all in the bowl and mix jobbies.

fucking x posts with lazy line

shit and buggeration

I really felt like I had had a Eureka cake moment there.

I'm going to make it anway and call it Slubber's LDSC

neerrr to LazyLine

I replace 20g of flour with 20g of cornflour in a Nigella styleeeee and it's brilliant. It makes it rise loads. Still use the baking powder as well though.

Get 4 eggs. weigh them and then use the same weight of butter, sugar, SF flour. And a teaspoon of baking powder and a splash of milk.

Whisk the butter and the sugar. Then add the eggs. Then the rest.

Put it in two tins for 25 mins.

I replace 20g of flour with 20g of cornflour in a Nigella styleeeee and it's brilliant. It makes it rise loads. Still use the baking powder as well though.

Get 4 eggs. weigh them and then use the same weight of butter, sugar, SF flour. And a teaspoon of baking powder and a splash of milk.

Whisk the butter and the sugar. Then add the eggs. Then the rest.

Put it in two tins for 25 mins.

whoops.

this Mary Berry book, is it this one?

Am still not convinced by this creaming butter and sugar business which you keep referring to. It always just seems like hard work to me. I don't have a mixer and really don't want to be buying one.

Am planning "Pea's Special LDSC" tomorrow.

yes it's that one. It's good. I love Mary.

I only cream with my hand mixer. There are some total weirdies on mn that claim you can do it with a wooden spoon . They are clearly barking mad with giant muscular right arms.

Oh and re the LDSC...

bugger off

My 4 year old creams the butter and sugar in this house. She just stirs and stirs.