Chocolate Sponge Cake

There are many things I despise about Christmas, and many things I love. And one of the parts I love is food! I actually really love the traditional desserts like fruit cake with fondant icing and pudding with custard, but I know this makes me rather strange. So I like to use Christmas as great opportunity for me to spread my wings a little and make a really yummy dessert that I'd normally never get away with making. There's always a large crowd at the three family Christmas parties we attend, which means my cooking is always going to get eaten, and hubby and I aren't left trying to finish two thirds of some obscenely fattening dish.

This year for our traditional boxing day lunch I decided to try something I'd never ever attempted before. Sponge cake. It's something I've often avoided, because you hear so many horror stories about sponge cakes. But the recipe in the Epicure Chocolate book said it never failed, and it looked simple enough, so armed with my new mix-master, I gave it a whirl.

To be honest I found the recipe extremely offputting. It's an old family recipe that was submitted to Epicure by a reader, so some of the directions are a tad vague. For example, it asked for a heaped dessert spoon full of cocoa. I'm used to much more precise measurements than that. Also, there was so little in the mixture. I'm used to putting masses of flour into my cupcakes, so the idea of making a double-layer cake with only half a cup of cornflour really threw me.

Thoughts - end result was FANTASTIC! I am so proud of my chocolate sponge. It tasted fantastic, it was cooked just right the whole way through, it didn't collapse or taste like rubber like the horror stories say can happen. The family lapped it up too. My dad did comment there was too much icing, but he always says that, and I thought I put the icing on very thinly. My biggest concern was that the whipped cream might make the cake soggy if I left it in the fridge overnight, but that didn't happen. I'll definitely be making this again and again!