Getting Started

The first thing we did was buy some cake tins. We went to Lakeland Plastics and bought a 12 portion muffin tin and a 16 x mini square cake tin. Charlotte liked the idea of the square cakes. Then we bought cake ingredients, and finally, this Wednesday, we actually made some cakes.

My friend Sarah suggested a recipe which is easy to remember: weigh the eggs and then use an equivalent amount of sugar, butter and self-raising flour. We used 4 eggs and they weighed 9 and one-eighth ounces. We also had a cake decorating book with lots of recipes in it so we added baking powder and vanilla essence, as it suggested.

We didn't really know how many cakes our mixture would make so decided to put half the mixture in the muffin tins and half in the mini square tins. This was a 'performance' as first we had to wash the tins up (the mini square cake tin had 33 separate parts!) and then measure 62.5g of mixture into each tin. Having done that and put 8 cakes worth in the oven we decided we may as well measure the cup cake mixture as well - and we used the same quantity.

The square cakes came out beautifully. We cut the tops off and had 8 perfect 2" cubes. We cut the top off the cup cakes too so they were flat and ready to be iced, but there wasn't much room left in the paper cake cases. Next time we'll cut down to 50g or 55g mixture. (I can't believe we are being so scientific about this!)