Confession time – I haven’t come up with a recipe for everything. Well not yet. I don’t have a recipe for success, nor thankfully do I have a recipe for disaster (though I have had my fair share of disastrous recipes) and until recently I didn’t have a recipe for a gluten-free, dairy-free Victoria sandwich. But one of the lovely (but sometimes pressuring) aspects of baking in the public eye is that people ask you for recipes and, if I don’t have one up my sleeve already, I feel obliged to roll up my sleeves and invent one. So, several months ago the lovely Julie gave me fair warning of her desire to bake said cake for a friend. And then a couple of weeks ago she kindly reminded me that I had yet to deliver. Actually Julie only wanted a gluten-free recipe but I liked the added challenge of making it dairy-free too. Turning to classic recipes for a fatless sponge, I discovered that many already include cornflour, which is gluten-free, so I started with this and set about tweaking. What I ended up with is now in the recipe section here…

Hardly a classic Victoria, this delicate creature is so light it cries out for a substantial filling to stop it floating away. Actually, one of the tips I read about fatless sponges is that you should drop the freshly baked cake, still in its tin, from knee height onto a hard floor. Apparently, this ‘shocks’ the cake and stops it from sinking on cooling. I tried this. I wouldn’t do it again. I swear that cake looked up at me with disdain – a Victoria that was not amused.