Lazy Cooking - Cake

There is a show on TV at the moment called Take on the Takeaway where top chefs try and cook a takeaway style dish that's quicker, cheaper and tastier than the equivalent takeaway. Genuinely lazy watchers will realise it's slightly misleading because the 'speed' part of the test doesn't take into account either the shopping time or the cleaning up time.

Still, cooking can be quick and easy, you can get supermarkets to deliver your shopping to your house and you can stick your dirty dishes in your dishwasher, if you are lucky enough to have one. Or in my case just leave them for my girlfriend to do. So maybe I'll add some easy/quick recipes on here, but I'll try and include the useful lazy info like how much special shopping you need to do and how much washing up needs doing.

With winter closing in it's getting darker and colder in the evenings and even though I don't have a very sweet tooth I've found I've wanted more sweet stuff to eat, so yesterday I decided to make a cake. Mmmm. Cake.




Basic Victoria Sponge

Shopping difficulty: Store cupboard stuff you can find in every supermarket and most local shops.
Amount of washing up: You need quite a few bowls and a cake tin.
Time from start to eating: 30 mins if you use the oven, 15 mins if you use the microwave
Equipment: You need something to bake it in if you are using the oven, and some bowls to mix stuff in.
Cost: Less than £1

Ingredients

4 Oz Self Raising Flour
4 Oz Caster Sugar
4 Oz Unsalted butter
2 Eggs

This is a scaleable recipe. You have equal quantities of flour, sugar and butter, and for every 2 ounces of each of those you use, you use 1 egg. The cake I made had 4Oz of butter, flour and caster sugar and 2 eggs. an 8Oz cake would use 4 eggs. Flour should be self raising, or add a level tsp of baking powder per 2 Oz of flour.

You can either cook this in the oven or in the microwave. The oven is much nicer, but the microwave is much quicker. If you are using the oven preheat it to 180C/350F/Gas 4 before you start mixing. (thanks to the interweb for the conversion)

Weigh your sugar, flour and butter out, stick them all in a bowl, add your eggs and cream it all together. The butter should have markings on the packet to help you guestimate the correct weight. This means stir them hard with a spoon until it looks creamy, you can use an electric mixer but it's more washing up and this doesn't take long, I reckon it's less hassle beating by hand than washing up the mixer. If you leave your butter out of the fridge to soften first it's much easier I normally don't bother. Some recipes say to mix the flour, sugar and butter together first, then add the eggs but I don't bother. Once it's all creamed together scrape the mixture into a cake tin, or a nice big microwave safe dish.

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes or microwave on high for about 4 minutes. The cooking time in the oven is the same for any size of cake. In the microwave it's going to depend on the power of your microwave and how big the cake is.

Easy.

I melted some fancy chocolate to put on mine, but you can cover it with anything. Just stuck some posh chocolate in a bowl above some boiling water (in a jug, no need to wash that up if it's only had boiling water in) added a bit of butter and icing sugar and poured it on the cake. Mmmm.