Week 19 - Golden Layer Cake

Quote from book: Celebrate a special occasion with this regal cake from an old Yorkshir recipe.

Don't be put off by all the stages - this is outstandingly good!

Faff Factor = 5

Bake = 1

Keeping Up Appearances = 1

Total score = 7/30

Oh dear oh dear oh dear, not a happy bunny :-(  I recently purchased The Women's Institute Vintage Teatime book and was really looking forward to my baking this weekend, but sad to say it did not go to plan - twice!. 

After my first attempt, which btw looked just like the one above in the photo, I thought something was wrong and the only thing I could put this down to was the baking powder.  It was nearing it's best by date and I once read that baking powder after 2 months of opening loses it's qualities as a raising agent , mine was opened over a year ago!  So off I went to buy some lovely new baking powder and to give this little gem of a cake another go. BUT yet again the same thing has happened, the cake did not rise and it is really heavy, dense and tastes claggy - definition: adj: British dialect; tending to form clots, sticky - I really don't know what went wrong so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and in the meantime I will be contacting the WI to stress my concerns with the recipe, you never know it could be a printing error that I do not know nothing about. 

I'm not making excuses as failures in my baking have happened before, see HERE and yes I know I've got to give these another try, but I really would like to know the reason why this tasty sounding cake was not a success. Did I mix it too much? did I add the syrup too quickly, oh I don't know.

As I only half finished the cake my faff factor score is pretty low and the lowest of the low scores for bake and appearances, I can only be truthful in my challenge.

If I hear back from The WI I will let you know but in the interim I am searching the internet for another golden layer cake recipe just to compare as I think it may have been too much syrup! See, I'm thinking all the time of what went wrong.

Toodle Pip

Lynetta Xx