Black and White Butter Cake

Just last week, Sarah's Godparents came over to visit over tea and as usual, the question of what to cook cropped up. I decided to keep things simple yet at the same time take the opportunity to try out something new. I settled for a simple Butter Cake.


Although I have a tried and tested Butter Cake recipe - that is basically a Pound Cake (you know, a pound of everything), I decided to broaden my horizons and try something new. This recipe comes from The Australian Womens Weekly Old Fashioned Favourites - Desserts|Cakes|Biscuits|Slices
and this is how it goes.

Ingredients
250g Butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 (275g) caster sugar
3 eggs
2 1/4 cups (335g) self raising flour
3/4 cup (180ml) milk
Method
Preheat oven to 180C. Grease and line a 22cm round or 19cm square cake pan.
Beat Butter, vanilla extract and sugar till light and fluffy.
Beat in eggs, one at a time. Stir in sifted flour and milk, in two batches.
Spread mixture into pan. Bake about 45 minutes or till done. Stand cake 5 mintues. Turn top side up onto wire rack to cool

Funny thing is, the actual recipe said to bake for about 1 hour but my cake was nicely done in 45 minutes. I think this may be due to the fact that my pan was slightly smaller and I used some of the batter to make a smaller cake. That probably accounts for the time difference perhaps.




We couldn't wait to try out the small cake as the house was filled with a lovely smell of baking! So as soon as the cakes were done, I popped the small cake out and my Little Princess proudly carried it off to show to The Lovely Wife. We wasted no time in cutting the cake and tasting it.



The cake was really nice and light. Almost like a sponge cake rather than a butter cake. Compared to my usual butter cake recipe, this has one less egg and about a 100 grams more of flour. Interesting how this affects the texture so much. Taste wise, it was really good too.




Too make it more interesting, I whipped up a batch of Orange flavoured butter icing and another batch of chocolate icing. For the Orange Icing, I mixed 60g butter, 2 cups icing sugar and about two Tbsps freshly squeezed orange juice together. I also added in some orange essence. I iced half the cake with the orange icing and then used the same basic recipe but omitted the orange juice and added in about 4 Tbsps of cocoa. I used the chocolate icing to ice the other half of the cake.

I also covered the cake with some roasted almond flakes. This gave it a nice crunch and the nuts went really well with the icing.



So with the twin colours of Black and White, I decided to name this simple cake, a Black and White Butter Cake. The kids preferred the chocolate icing over the orange but having two small slices of each flavour was really the way to go!