Baking trials and tribulations...

I'm going to my friends' house to cheer on the London Marathon runners tomorrow (they live right next to the marathon route) and I thought I'd make a couple of cakes to take along. Namely a Victoria sponge (I just use my mum's recipe - you weigh the eggs and then use an equal amount of butter, sugar and flour. My eggs weighed 200g so that's what I used) and a cinnamon swirl cake.

The cinnamon swirl cake came together with no trouble at all - the batter looked so pretty before it went into the oven, and just as pretty when it came out! It's got a fantastic crunchy sugary topping and I can't wait to cut into it.





But then I got the sponge cakes out of the oven...and they were as flat as a pancake. Obviously, the (unlabelled) tub of flour in the cupboard, which I could have sworn was self-raising, wasn't. I looked at the poor sad cakes and knew that my options were to a) throw them away, b) eat them all by myself or c) try to salvage something out of them. 'Cake balls', I thought. And then when I'd stopped swearing, I had a quick Google for a recipe. The cake pop phenomenon that swept the internet a while back shows no sign of going away, and happily I discovered that I could turn my cake disaster into something ridiculously yummy with the addition of just a couple of ingredients. Namely a tub of ready-made frosting and some chocolate. Obviously I had to make cake balls, because I didn't have any sticks to turn them into cake pops, but I think they look pretty good!



And then I also did this: