by Agatha Jane Parrot . . .
This is how to make a sponge cake. (Other cakes are a bit harder and fruit cakes take ages so it’s better to buy one in a shop.)
What you need:
• A cupful of soft butter or margarine (or maybe a bit less)
• A cupful of caster sugar. This is like normal sugar but more powdery.
• A cupful of self-raising flour (or maybe a bit more)
• 3 eggs
• Loads of jam and cream and stuff
What you have to do:
1. Get an old person to turn on the oven so it warms up. Tell them that it needs to be set to 4°C or gas mark 180. Or maybe it’s the other way round.
2. Mix up the butter and the caster sugar in a big bowl. You need to squidge it round and round with a spoon so it all turns into a big mushy lump.
3. Break the eggs into a different bowl. Pick all the bits of shell out then whizz them round with a fork until all the yellow and white is mixed up. Don’t lick the fork because that’s gross.
4. Pour the eggs in with the sugar and butter mush and stir it up so it’s slimy and mushy.
5. Sprinkle flour on the top and keep squidging it round all the time until all the flour is mixed in.
6. Put the stuff in a cake tin for cooking but BEFORE YOU DO, you have to rub round the inside of the tin with a bit of butter or it will all stick and burn on the insides.
7. Get your helpful old person to put the tin of mix in the oven. That way if anybody gets a burn on their finger it’s them and not you.
8. Go and watch telly for 20 minutes while the old person moans about how messy the kitchen is.
9. Return to find the kitchen is miraculously clean. Ask old person to get cake out of the oven.
10. Go and watch more telly until the cake cools down.
11. Cover cake with cream and jam and stuff while the old person moans about how they only just cleaned the kitchen and now it’s even worse than before. And there’s your cake. Ta-dah!
Serves 6 people. (That’s if you cut it into 6 bits. If you cut it into 8 bits then it serves 8 people. And if Martha gets to it first then it only serves 1 person.)
