Soph is baking birthday cake today. As it’s for a certain 5yo it’s chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream and fondant icing, all in a Star Wars theme. Today it’s just baking the cakes, so Soph is roughly following this chocolate madeira cake recipe. She’s cooking two cakes, and each one is using double the recipe!

It’s a proper cake, which in my book means start with creaming fat and sugar.

Then adding the eggs one at a time.

Then the dry ingredients get sieved in, due to the cocoa powder which clumps up.

This gets mixed up, and the extra liquids (vanilla extract and milk) mixed in.

The tin (despite being non-stick) gets lined.

Then the mixture goes in.

This gets cooked for 55 minutes at 160c fan, until a wooden skewer comes out dry. And in true Blue Peter style… here’s one we did earlier.

Tomorrow we’ll decorate them all Star Warsy, roughly following these guidelines. But with more light sabres.