Not your boring sponge: Part the First

Lindsey's birthday falls in the Easter break this year, so she wouldn't be able to celebrate with Oxford friends on her actual birthday (a predicament I can sympathise with). Thus, she's having her celebration tomorrow instead and I decided to bake her a cake in lieu of a present. Now, I have pretty much always thought that sponge cakes are fairly boring. Nice, but very boring. So I thought I'd try something different. She said she wanted a coffee cake, so I did almost resort to making a sponge and adding instant coffee. But luckily, I stumbled across a more interesting recipe that I could adapt. So here's the cakey bit of the cake. Sandwich filling (yes it will be a sandwich cake, but I don't have sandwich cake tins - in a perfect world, I would have baked it for ~25 mins at 200C/Gas Mark 6 in shallow sandwich tins) and maybe also icing will follow in a subsequent post...

Coffee and Walnut Cake
Ingredients
For the cake:

• 5 Eggs, separated
• 125g/4 1/2oz Caster sugar
• 125g/4 1/2oz Soft dark brown sugar
• 250g/9oz Walnuts, finely chopped
• 2 tsp Instant coffee, crushed
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla extract
• 100g/3 1/2oz Plain flour

Method

1. Mix four of the egg yolks with the caster sugar and soft dark brown sugar in a bowl
2. Stir in the chopped walnuts, the instant coffee and the vanilla extract
3. Stir in the flour, a little at a time
4. Whisk the (five) egg whites in a separate bowl until they form stiff peaks. Fold gently into the cake mixture
5. Pour into a lined loose-bottomed cake tin and bake at 170C/Gas Mark 3-4 for an hour, or until a skewer comes out clean
6. Remove from the tin and allow to cool on a wire rack

I was amazed when I took it out of the oven first time around - it looked absolutely gorgeous, so I thought I had better take a photo before poking a hole in the top with a skewer:

And here's the finished cake:

Incidentally, if anyone is wondering why the holes in the top of the cake are quite so large, it's because I don't have skewers and I've been using chopsticks to test my cakes! (Actually, a much bigger problem at the moment is that I don't have a mixing bowl. I've been making my cakes in saucepans mostly!).