Olive Oil Almond Cake with Vanilla Roasted Strawberries

Its a bougie victoria sandwich

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What happens when you change something in a recipe?

Surely you’ve heard the saying that baking is a science and cooking is an art? This springs from the idea that if you change something in a baking recipe the whole thing may come tumbling down, the scientifically balanced recipe not able to handle a bit of tweaking. And whilst this is true to an extent playing around with recipes is how I make a living. You shouldn’t be afraid to play around with a recipe, you just need to know what you’re doing.

If you understand the role that different ingredients play in a recipe, it becomes a little easier to tweak without epic disasters. We’ve all seen those incredible New York Times recipe comments where someone ran out of flour so used breadcrumbs or they used mashed banana instead of butter in a brownie. There is nothing wrong with tweaking a recipe you just need to use a little common sense and some good solid baking basics. It is this idea of tweaking and adapting recipes that got me thinking this week.

I wanted to tweak a Victoria sandwich recipe to make something new, dare I say make a…better version. And look, I love a Victoria sandwich but, If I was starting from scratch, I probably wouldn’t have ended up with the classic recipe. When well made, it can be excellent but I’ve had far too many dry versions, we can make it moister and while we’re at it we can also give it more flavour

A Victoria sandwich is a British classic, a simple sandwich cake filled with cream and jam. Okay, in the original version it was just jam but I think most people agree it is far better when the cream is involved. To make my changes I wanted to incorporate some ground almonds but also switch out some of the butter for olive oil. The resulting cake still felt and looked like a classic Victoria sponge but it was just…better. The oil means the cake stayed moist for longer and paired with the almonds the cake had more flavour, the addition of added egg yolks also makes the cake a little richer, a bit more special.

I also had some thoughts on the filling. A simple cream filling is absolutely delicious. Don’t get me wrong, I love a Victoria sponge but why do a simple whipped cream when mascarpone whipped cream exists? I also decided to do away with the jam, I wanted something fresher with a better flavour. Instead, I opted to use vanilla-roasted strawberries. By roasting the strawberries you get the concentrated flavour you’d expect with jam but a juicer texture and a fresher strawberry flavour.