Well technically it’s not exactly the same recipe as in the book. It was actually for a ‘Classic Victoria sponge with all the trimmings’ but I had a craving for chocolate cake instead. I used the same sponge ingredients except I added cocoa for the chocolatey goodness and the filling is 40g butter, 40g icing sugar and 1 tsp cocoa. Yum.

My last attempt to make a chocolate cake was a complete disaster. If the sponge wasn’t so heavy it would of made a great frisbee put it that way! I’m really pleased with how this one turned out though.

The ‘Cook with Jamie’ book is split in to chapters i.e. salads, pasta, meat, vegetables, desserts etc and each chapter has a useful few pages about each subject.

The dessert section was particularly helpful as it explained the methods available for making a sponge or cake, whisking, creaming, melting etc and gave top tips for making cakes. I could see straight away where I had gone wrong before so, without getting too confident, I was hopeful that it would work out well this time.

There is still room for improvement. I could see that when I was blending the butter/sugar mix with the eggs that it was beginning to curdle. I don’t know how or if this affects the end result but I do know from the book that it was happening because I was blending them to rigourously. Jamie says they need ‘gentle persuasion’ to blend together.

Also, I have always used our electric mixer to combine the ingredients and I think I made the mistake of mixing the flour in too long last time. It just knocked all of the air bubbles out of it. I mixed the flour in a lot less this time and they rose more in the oven, however there was a fair amount of unmixed ingredient in the bowl when I was transferring it to the cake tins. I think this is more a fault of our electric blender than anything so maybe mixing by hand will have even better results.

I started by looking online for some interesting recipes and found some good websites, for example www.goodfoodchannel.co.uk but the choices were a bit overwhelming for a complete beginner. Where to start?

Instead I decided to check out the cookery section in the local library. They have a good selection of cooking books here in Aberdeen so this is what I have decided to do….

Each month I will loan one cook book from the library and make a selection of recipes from it. I didn’t want to set myself a big challenge like Julia in ‘Julie & Julia’ the movie and attempt to make every recipe in each book. As much fun as that would be I don’t have enough time and would only be disappointed when I didn’t succeed. Instead I am going to pick a selection of recipes that I think we will like and give them a go.

Wish me luck!