Gran’s Chocolate Smartie Cake

When I was really little, my Gran used to come and pick me up from school on a Tuesday and we’d go home to her house. And then we’d either do baking or gardening or both. And later, when my Mum came to get me on the Metro to take me home, there’d be a little box of something sweet to take home with us.

We learned to bake all sorts of things at my Gran’s. Rock buns, scones, jam tarts made with homemade pastry (she had very cold hands), buns and fairy cakes, and on special occasions, a chocolate cake for tea.

My Gran always used the same traditional recipe for sponge cakes. It involved precariously balancing two eggs on the weights plate on one side of her very traditional mechanical scales, and then weighing out the same weight of margarine, sugar and then flour in the pan on the other side. A a decent tablespoon of cocoa was also added. And then we furiously beat the ingredients together in a Mason Cash old-school ceramic mixing bowl using a wooden spoon. I don’t think she even had a whisk.

And the resulting cake would be light, fluffy and perfectly baked in her ancient white oven. The end result was made far more chocolatey by the addition of lots of chocolate buttercream. And smarties on top if it was a really special occasion.

Lakeland do a Mini Sponge Cake tin, and I’ve used it several times with this recipe too. They come out a treat.