Sticky Butterscotch Cake….

I grew up eating and helping to make home made cakes and other goodies, which probably explains my sweet tooth! I still love cake and I’m still using my grandmother’s method of weighing the eggs in their shells first and using that weight as the basis for the other ingredients. It’s a method that’s never let me down and has served as a great foundation for inventing recipes ever since. However, anyone who is on a healthy eating mission had better not read any further as this one is calorie laden!

There are two parts to this cake – a simple sponge and a butterscotch sauce – but we’ll start with the sponge:

Preheat the oven to 180°C and grease and line an 8″ loose bottomed round cake tin. Weigh 3 large free range eggs in their shells. Whatever that weight is measure out the same quantity in soft brown sugar, self raising flour and softened butter. Add ½ teaspoon of pure vanilla extract and 1 tablespoon of milk. The “all in one” method works well here, so just chuck all the cake ingredients into a bowl or food mixer and beat away until the mixture is well blended, smooth and creamy.

Pour the cake mixture into the prepared tin and bake in the oven for about 45 minutes, or until the cake is springy to the touch. Do not remove the cake from the tin – it needs to stay in there to soak up all of the lovely butterscotch sauce!

Whilst the cake is in the oven prepare the butterscotch sauce. Into a saucepan put 100g butter, 100g soft brown sugar and 100mls of evaporated milk.

Melt these all together and then bring the mixture slowly to the boil, stirring it all the time so that it does not stick to the pan. Gently simmer the sauce for 5 minutes. It will start to thicken slightly, but will still be fairly runny. Set it aside to cool for a few minutes until the cake has finished baking.

Leaving the cake in the tin, pierce it all over with a skewer and then pour the butterscotch sauce over the surface of the cake. I would strongly advise you not to taste the sauce at this stage otherwise you’ll be tempted to just eat it all straight from the pan and then you’d have to make another batch! Leave the cake and sauce to their own devices until they are quite cold, then you may remove it gently from the tin. During this time the golden sponge will have soaked up the toffee-flavoured sauce and you’ll be left with a delicious cake that is the perfect companion to a cuppa!