Sponge tray bake

This blog post has been a long time coming...I've been rather busy lately, including a trip to Paris in which I found some brilliant ways of serving couscous and boeuf bourguignon-- the former is great with fried merguez and harissa separate to the stew/couscous, and the latter is brilliant with tagliatelle/spaghetti!

So I found myself somewhat housebound the other day, recovering from a minor op, and decided to do some baking with what I had in the flat. Not a lot, but enough to make a very simple sponge tray bake. 

I've never tried baking a tray bake before, but the idea seemed (and is) simple enough. I've said previously that I dislike the chemical side to baking, and with a tray bake that more-or-less disappears. Indeed, you simply put everything into the mixing bowl at the same time and mix it all up, before spooning it into a tray.

I used a classic Mary Berry recipe (from her book Mary Berry's Ultimate Cookbook (London: BBC, 2003)), which was really simple:

• 225g butter
• 225g caster sugar
• 275g self-raising flour
• 4 eggs 
• 4 tablespoons of milk

Combine them all in a bowl, give them a good stir for about 2 minutes and then spoon them onto a greased roasting tin (Mary Berry recommends 30cm x 23cm, but mine was more like 30cmx 15cm and it fitted fine.)

Leave to cook at 180 degrees centigrade for about 35 minutes (in the fan oven it was cooked after 25). 

I found that dusting it with some icing sugar, as Mary Berry recommends, worked much better than with caster sugar--what I normally use to dust Victoria sponges.

I'd recommend only base-lining the tin with any greaseproof paper, as it can eat into the sponge otherwise (see the lemon drizzle post).

Cut into bitesize pieces- it's enough for 30 or so pieces.

Et voici les résultats:

Cut into nice bitesize chunks!