For the cake:
- 175g unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 175g golden caster sugar
- 3 eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 200g self raising flour
- 50g ground almonds
- 1 tablespoon milk – only add if needed (see method)
- 300 icing sugar
- 1-3 teaspoons boiling water – you might not need it all
- Purple food colouring
- gold star
- black icing
Method
- Preheat oven to 170C/Fan oven 150C/340F/gas mark 3.
- Grease a 20cm flower shaped pan – you can also use a normal 20cm round springform, or a 900g loaf tin if you’re not fussed about making your cake look like LSP!
- Beat together the butter and sugar until it is light and fluffy – don’t skimp on this stage. Because of the ratios, and the fact that it’s golden caster sugar, the batter won’t go quite as light and fluffy as it would for say a normal sponge mix.
- Beat in the eggs, one at a time.
- Beat in the vanilla.
- Fold in the flour and ground almonds.
- The mixture should be dropping consistency i.e. fall of the spoon with only gentle encouragement. If it isn’t, fold in a tablespoon of milk to slacken it.
- Spoon into the prepared cake tin and level the surface.
- Bake for approximately 40 mins – 1 hour. It will take nearer the hour if you use a loaf tin, but less if you use a round tin. Start checking after 30 minutes for a round tin, just to make sure you don’t leave it in too long. The cake is ready when a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.
- Leave to cool in the tin for 20 minutes before de-tinning and leaving to cool completely on a wire rack.
- Once the cake is cool place a large sheet of foil under the cooling rack – this will catch any icing drips and make the clean up easy.
- Now make the glaze: Beat the boiling water into the icing sugar a teaspoon at a time. This doesn’t seem like a lot of water but the glaze can become too runny so quickly that I like to go slow and monitor the change each teaspoon makes.
- When the glaze is gloopy but not quite as runny as you want, add the food colouring. As this is a gel it will also have an effect on the viscosity of the icing.
- Once you reach the point where the icing is glossy and runny (but still thick) spoon it over the cake and gently spread it out so that it runs down the sides. To get good coverage on the sides there will be waste, hence the foil under the cooling rack.
- Leave to set.
- Using a black icing pen (I wanted to get one from the supermarket but they didn’t have any – Tesco, grrrrr, so I ended up making one with food dye which was a bit grey) ice on LSP’s eyes, mouth and arms.
- Place the gold star in the centre of her forehead.
- Bask in the glory of the wonderful thing you have created.
- Serving.