This is the cake which I baked for Gordon’s birthday and it’s based on a Marguerite Patten recipe. It was a nice change from a completely chocolate cake. Although the ingredients specify using castor sugar I usually just use normal white sugar. The brown sugar can be any kind from Demerara to dark soft brown sugar depending on how strong you want the toffee flavour to be.

6 oz brown sugar
5 oz butter or marg.
4 tablespoons milk
2 oz castor sugar
2 eggs
8 oz self-raising flour

Put the brown sugar, 1 oz butter and 4 tablespoons of milk into a heavy based pan and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Then allow the mixture to reach the ‘soft ball’ stage.

Cream the remaining butter and sugar together until it’s soft and light then beat in the warm toffee syrup gradually to stop the mixture from curdling. If it does curdle just add some flour.

Beat in the eggs and then the rest of the flour.

Put the cake mixture into an 8 inch cake tin which has been well greased.

Bake for about 50 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 170 C, Gas mark 3 or 325-350 F. Remove from oven and run a knife around the edge of the cake tin, the cake should come out quite easily. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

This cake tastes lovely on its own but I decided to cover it with my own version of buttercream icing. This is quick and easy, no faffing about with butter and cocoa powder required.

Nutella Topping
Place about 3 heaped tablespoons of Nutella into a glass bowl with a sploosh of milk, about a quarter of a cupful, and microwave for about 30 seconds on medium or until the Nutella mixture has melted. It depends on the strength of your microwave.

Stir the mixture until the milk is well incorporated then add about 4 heaped tablespoons of icing sugar into it. Be sure to sift the icing sugar first otherwise the icing will be lumpy.

Mix well and quickly spread it over the cake and down the sides if wished. It sets fairly fast so I couldn’t get the top of my cake as smooth as I wanted and I ended up taking a rolling pin to a bar of Aero to disguise the top. No disaster. Chocolate on top of chocolate isn’t exactly a problem.

We were half way to Stirling before I realised that I had left the birthday candles behind. So we had to improvise with a tealight. Well, he could still make a wish, which is the main thing.