St Clements (oranges and lemons) cake

This is a basic orange flavoured Victoria sponge cake with lemon curd filling and a lemon buttercream frosting.  So good!

Go as extravagant with the decoration as you please, I'm no cake decorator, as you can see, but it was great fun playing with an icing bag and sprinkles.

Ingredients:
for the sponge
100g baking fat or butter
100g caster sugar
175g SR flour
1tsp baking powder
2tsp orange essence food flavouring
3 x eggs
for the buttercream frosting
150g butter
300g icing sugar
1tbsp lemon juice
1-2tsp yellow food colouring

Optional:  sprinkles, orange and yellow jelly sweets, lemon curd.

Method:

Pre heat your oven to 200C or equivalent.  Put all of the sponge ingredients into a food mixer and beat slowly until combined then increase the speed to really whip it up.  This can be done by hand with a whisk.

Generously butter two small cake tins and divide the sponge batter between them.  Bake for 20 minutes and check the sponges are cooked by inserting a clean knife into the centre, if it comes out clean it's cooked.  Tip out onto a cooling rack and let them cool completely before decorating.

For my sponge I filled with lemon curd then sandwiched the two halves together.  The buttercream was mixed in the cleaned food mixer bowl using the same method as for the sponge.  This is a lovely citrusy sponge with a sweet orange background note followed by the sharper tang of the lemon juice in the frosting.  Great fun for the children to get involved in too.