Marge’s Famous Raisin Sponge Cake

I am doubtful as to whether kids love the zing of raisins. I (as a somewhat grown adult) am fairly indifferent to their zing myself. But raisins aren’t the real point of this Raisin Sponge Cake recipe. Plus I’m supposed to burn a perfectly serviceable cake and then cover it in pink frosting! I used the following recipe for a Raisin Butter Cake and then made a few adjustments to the ingredients. Next I divided the batter to create a Control Cake and a Burned Cake. The baking results were mixed to say the least.

Ingredients

3/4 cup butter
3/4 cups of flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs
4 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup raisins

Directions

Mix flour and baking powder and set aside. Using a stand mixer, mix butter and sugar together until creamed. Next beat in one egg at a time, then add vanilla extract and milk. Gradually add flour mixture until combined and fold raisins in. Pour batter into a well greased pan.

Marge’s original recipe is to bake for 20 minutes at 300 degrees, but since she has no time she bakes for 5 minutes at 1200 degrees. My oven only goes up to 530 degrees, so I baked the Burned Cake at that temperature for 45 minutes. I have to say that 300 degrees is not really high enough to bake a cake and so Control Cake took much longer than 20 minutes to bake, 55 minutes to be exact. Here’s the Burned Cake:

The Control Cake tasted ok, like something your Great Aunt would force you to eat after a Sunday dinner. Unfortunately, after making the Burned Cake my house smelled of nasty burnt cake for days afterwards. Days! The cake was charred to a crisp and I still needed to get some frosting on it. Quite frankly I just wanted to stay in a hotel room for the night and avoid all the mistakes in my life that had lead up to this point. I frosted the cake anyway.

Even the frosting wanted nothing to do with this monstrosity…as you can see this didn’t really turn out at all. Before the bake sale Marge drops her cake on the ground and has to dust it off. So let’s just pretend that is the version I made here. The good news is that once you get past the charred outside, the inside of the cake was still mostly unharmed and edible. And no, even though I wanted to, I did not throw the cake like a discus.