A Victoria sandwich cake is the perfect sweet treat recipe to bake for your mum, grandma or auntie this Mother’s Day. For a Victoria sandwich cake, my go-to recipe is one from BBC Good Food – it makes the most moist sponge and it’s super easy too.
To make it even easier, I decided to make it using the Morphy Richards MixStar. It’s essentially a stand mixer with a design that closely resembles a food processor.
The Morphy Richards MixStar’s design is simple – a 650W machine forms the base with the 4L mixing bowl, plus the lid docking into place on top. Instead of an attachment arm over the top like other stand mixers, the MixStar has a drive shaft inside the mixing bowl that you secure the attachments to, as you would do a food processor.
The design of the attachments is also unique. For the whisking and mixing functions, you have a “twin assembly spindle” which you attach a pair of whisks or beaters instead of just one. For the cake, I used the beaters attachments. There’s also a bowl scraper attachment that I used at the same time that stops you from having to pause the machine to scrape down the sides.
Retailing for £99 currently, The Morphy Richards MixStar’s unusual design means it can be a bit confusing to assemble at first. However, once you get the hang of it, it’s really easy.
To get started, I began by weighing out all the ingredients listed below and washing all of the MixStar attachments. The MixStar attachments and bowl are both dishwasher safe, and you can simply wipe the base clean.
Ingredients
For the sponge
200g caster sugar
200g softened butter
Four eggs, beaten
200g self-raising flour
One teaspoon baking powder
Two tablespoons milk
For the filling
140g strawberry/raspberry jam
150ml double cream
Icing sugar, for dusting
Method
I preheated the oven to 170C Fan and greased and lined two 20cm sandwich tins and lined them with butter and baking paper.
To the mixer, I added the sugar and butter and creamed them together. This only took a minute in the mixer when I set the speed setting to four. The scraper attachment proved essential for this step in making sure no sugar or butter got stuck to the side of the bowl and wasn’t integrated.
Once creamed together, I added in the flour, eggs, baking powder and milk before giving it a mix. This time I set the speed to three for one minute. This appliance comes with a built-in timer which is a feature I didn’t know I needed on a stand mixer, but it is amazing for recipes with strict timings.
While the MixStar was in use I did notice that it made a fair bit of noise compared to a few other stand mixers I used before.
The next step was to divide the mixture between the tins. As the drive shaft is located inside the mixing bowl, it made it a little difficult to scoop out the cake batter.
I found that the cakes needed 30 minutes in the oven, as opposed to the 20 minutes that the recipe calls for. Once cooked, I left the cakes to cool completely on a cooling wrack.
In the meantime, I got to work on whisking the cream for the cake filling. To do so, I gave the bowl, whisks, bowl scraper and assembly cover, spindles and gear a wash before assembling them to the appliance again.
To whip the cream I used speed setting number five for three minutes. It came out perfect with no effort needed at all to get the cream to the right consistency.
Once the cakes were cold, I added the cream to one of the sponges and covered the other one in jam before stacking them.
For the final step, I dusted the cake with a little icing sugar before serving. The cake came out light, fluffy and moist – it was delicious.
Not only can this mixer make brilliant cakes, but it can also be used to make bread with its dough hook attachments.
The Morphy Richards Mixstar was surprisingly powerful, and I felt it was comparable to some of the traditional stand mixers on the market, but for a fraction of the price.
It’s also smaller than most stand mixers and its in-built storage makes it easy to stow away when you’re done with it.
However, it’s worth bearing in mind that it is noisy and there is a 10-minute time limit. The machine will power through most tasks well within that time frame, but if you’re cooking a few things at the same time, that might be an issue.
