Breakfast: Porridge; Currant Buns.
I had some porridge already made from yesterday, so we had a little of that each, plus the last of the buns.
Lunch: Leftover Beef-steak Pudding / Ham and Cheese Sandwiches.
I made the sandwiches for Husband and Daughter, but thoroughly enjoyed more of the beef-steak pudding myself.
It may not look fantastic in the photos, but I thought it was super yummy. I was pleased to discover that the pastry held up okay to being refrigerated and then zapped in the microwave, too. (Obviously it wasn't quite as good as when it was first cooked, but it didn't really go soggy either).
A Victoria Sponge cake is actually the very first thing we decided we definitely wanted to include as part of our Victorian week. So when we were planning our menu, I went looking for an old recipe for a "Victoria Sponge Cake". And found nothing. That can't be right, I thought.
But it turns out, the big round "Victoria Sponge Cake" of today, laden with jam and lashings of cream (and, sometimes, fresh strawberries), really doesn't seem to have been a thing in the Victorian era. As far as I can tell, it seems to have evolved from this recipe - the Victoria Sandwich.
Now, it is essentially the same cake. And the funny thing is, the old recipes are right - this isn't a sponge cake at all, really. Whether you are using Mrs Beeton's recipe or Mary Berry's, the ingredients are more or less the same: equal weights of egg, butter, sugar, and flour, (with sometimes a little milk added).
Which means that actually, it's a pound cake.
There are just a few differences between this and a modern recipe: firstly, no baking powder or bicarb soda were included (the rise coming purely from the amount of air one can beat into the eggs). Baking powder wasn't yet available in the 1850s, so fair enough, although baking soda was. Apparently noone had yet thought to pop some into this cake though.
Secondly, the shape: this was not baked in a round tin and served as a large cake, but was always baked in a large square or rectangular tin, and cut into rectangular fingers.
And thirdly, I could find no references at all to serving this with cream - it was simply sandwiched together with jam, and dusted with powdered sugar.
Sorry if I'm boring you here; I just found all this fascinating - nearly everything I thought I knew about this cake was wrong!
Anyway, once it was baked, cooled, spread with strawberry jam, sandwiched together, and dusted with icing sugar, I followed Mrs Beeton's very specific serving instructions:
"... cut it into long finger-pieces; pile them in crossbars on a glass dish, and serve."
Why it matters that the dish is glass is anyone's guess - maybe she thought it looked fancy?
This cake tasted exactly as I expected it to - it was very nice, although not quite as light and fluffy as a modern version would be (due to the lack of baking powder).
We all enjoyed it, and there is definitely something lovely about eating this whilst drinking tea from pretty china teacups!
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