Victoria Sponge Cupcake

Forgot to add this to my main recipe post, but this is the cupcakes cut in half - I just love how gorgeous the jam looks tucked inside the fluffy sponge cake!

Recipe: Classic Victoria Sponge Cake & Vanilla Buttercream Frosting

I think that the Victoria sponge cake was the very first thing I ever learned to bake as a child and baking it now always reminds me of weekend afternoons spent meticulously weighing and measuring ingredients and then taking the mixing bowl to my Dad to get his help with beating the butter and sugar together.
Then I would wait (impatiently!) for the cake to cool before slathering it with jam and making a soft, fluffy buttercream filling.
There were a lot of times when I just couldn’t wait any longer and the filling would go inside a still slightly warm cake which, of course, melted the buttercream and more often than not would cause the top half of the cake to slowly slide off the bottom half so I had to push it back on and squish it down gently to stop it happening again.

Today, instead of making an entire round cake, I doubled the mixture and made Victoria sponge cupcakes.
Once they were cooled, I hollowed out a small well in the middle of each cupcake, filled that with strawberry jam and then topped it all off by piping vanilla buttercream frosting over the top of the jam filled wells.