There are several types of biscuits: classic, vanilla, chiffon, Victorian. The latter is also called Queen Victoria's biscuit. Its recipe with a step-by-step description of all actions will be presented in our article.
Queen Victoria's incredible biscuit
This amazingly delicious dessert, or rather, a cake, can be safely called almost the most popular in the UK. In many English cafes, he enjoys wildly popular. And if you take into account the fact that a biscuit is being prepared from the simplest ingredients, it is almost impossible to explain the appearance of such an interesting taste and unusual texture. Lush cakes are soft and elastic at the same time. It has a porous texture, crumbles a little when cut, but it remains moist inside. This is how Queen Victoria’s perfect biscuit comes from Andy Chef. The recipe for its preparation will be presented below.
Victorian biscuit has an interesting story. According to legend, after the death of her husband, Queen Victoria (Prince Albert), she was completely estranged from society. Only a few years later Her Majesty again began to have tea parties in the garden, where a popular dessert was an airy sponge cake layered with strawberry jam. It was he who became the favorite cake of the British Queen.
List of ingredients
According to the classic recipe, Queen Victoria's biscuit is prepared from such products:
- eggs - 4 pcs.;
- butter - 250 g;
- sugar - 250 g;
- flour - 250 g;
- baking powder - 8 g;
- vanilla extract - 2 tsp;
- lemon zest to taste.
To interlayer biscuit cakes, strawberry confiture is used. It should be prepared from the following ingredients:
- strawberries - 500 g;
- icing sugar - 300 g;
- agar-agar - 3 g;
- lemon juice - 25 ml.
For a gentle cream you will need:
- cream with a fat content of 33-38% - 400 ml;
- icing sugar - 100 g.
Fresh strawberries are ideal as a decoration for the cake.
How to knead the dough for biscuit?
A special, porous and dense texture of the cake can be achieved only if all the actions provided for in the recipe are strictly observed:
- Put soft butter at room temperature in a clean and dry deep bowl and cover with sugar.
- Beat the ingredients well with a mixer for 5 minutes. The consistency should become homogeneous, creamy.
- Into the creamy mass one at a time add all the eggs, each time beating them well for 1 minute.
- Combine the flour in a separate bowl with a baking powder and mix.
- In parts, introduce the flour mixture into the creamy mass, whisking at a low speed mixer.
- Add the lemon zest and vanilla extract to the dough.
- Soft, homogeneous, cream-like dough, ready. Now it can be laid out in a mold of a suitable size and baked in a preheated oven.
How to bake a fluffy biscuit?
A cake with a diameter of 20 cm or even 16 cm is ideal for baking cakes. In the latter case, you will get a small, but high biscuit, which will look original on the table. When baking cakes, you should adhere to the following sequence of actions:
- Preheat the oven to 190 °.
- Cover the bottom of the form with parchment. So the biscuit will be easier to extract from it.
- Lubricate the side walls of the mold with butter and sprinkle flour on top, and shake off its excess. This is the so-called "French shirt", which is used by professional confectioners.
- Put the dough in the form. It is enough immediately for 2 cakes. The dough should be thick. And this is its main difference from traditional biscuits.
- Smooth the dough with a spatula to make the surface as flat as possible.
- Immediately send the form to the preheated oven for 25 minutes. As soon as the surface is slightly browned, you should check the readiness of the biscuit with a toothpick.
- Remove the form with the finished cake from the oven and leave it on the grill for 5 minutes.
- Ready-made biscuit to cool well. It is advisable to turn it upside down and put it on the grill to get rid of the characteristic dome.
Strawberry confiture
In the original recipe, berry jam is used as a layer for biscuit. That's what the English call him. But the French used the word "confiture" for this. But the essence is the same - the berry layer makes the biscuit juicy, moist, tender, amazingly tasty.
You can prepare strawberry confiture for the cake according to the following step-by-step recipe:
- Agar-agar (3 g) soak in a small amount of water and leave at room temperature for 20 minutes.
- The washed berries (500 g) are chopped with a submersible blender until puree.
- Pour strawberry mass with fine sugar or powder (300 g).
- Put the jam on a small fire, bring it to a boil and, periodically removing the foam, cook it for 5 minutes.
- Swollen agar-agar pour into a stewpan. Bring it to a boil and immediately remove from heat.
- Add liquid agar agar and lemon juice (25 ml) to the jam. Boil it for another 1 minute, cool slightly and pour over the banks.
- Out of this amount of ingredients, 750 ml of strawberry confiture should be obtained.
- For Queen Victoria's biscuit, you need only 4 tablespoons of jam. The rest of the confiture can be stored in the refrigerator for 2-3 months.
Queen Victoria Biscuit Cream
To perfect the taste of biscuit cakes and gourmet berry confiture cream will help. Gentle whipped cream is perfect for this cake.
Queen Victoria's biscuit cream recipe is prepared as follows:
- Place the whipping bowl, whisks and cream in the freezer 15 minutes before starting work with the ingredients.
- Pour the cream into a cold bowl.
- Add icing sugar.
- Beat the ingredients with a mixer at high speed. At first, it may seem that nothing is happening and the cream will remain liquid. But around the fifth minute of whipping, they will begin to thicken. As soon as the mass keeps its shape well and the peaks become stable, the whipping process should be stopped. Otherwise, the cream will turn into butter.
Assembly and decoration of the cake
To layer the cake, whipped cream and confiture are used. Such filling makes the cake so self-sufficient that there is no need for its special decoration. You can simply sprinkle the biscuit with powdered sugar and decorate it with whole berries of strawberries on top.
The assembly of the cake is performed in the following sequence:
- Strawberry jam (4 tbsp. L.) Is slightly heated in the microwave or in a water bath so that it becomes liquid.
- Wash the berries (5-10 pcs.), Dry and cut into thin plates. Combine fresh strawberries with jam and mix.
- Spread strawberry confiture on the bottom cake. While the jam is liquid, it will saturate the biscuit properly, and then it will harden and hold its shape well.
- Put whipped cream on top of the berry jam.
- Cover the cake with a second cake.
- Decorate a Victorian biscuit as you wish.
Cooking Tips & Tricks
To make the biscuit really tasty and very similar to the original, when baking and assembling it will not be superfluous to use the following tips from experienced confectioners:
- As during the reign of Queen Victoria, the biscuit recipe is based on one mandatory rule: ingredients for the cake, such as flour, butter and sugar, are taken in equal amounts.
- An important condition for the preparation of Victorian biscuit is the accurate weighing of all products. Moreover, experienced confectioners recommend using scales not only for oil and bulk products, but also for eggs. They should be weighed without shells.
- Cake cakes can be layered with jam and cream immediately after baking. But you can make them even wetter. To do this, wrap them in cling film and put in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours.
How to make the cream thicker?
The whole difficulty of making a Victorian biscuit is that a dense biscuit cake may be too heavy for a gentle whipped cream cream. As a result, the high strawberry-creamy layer will turn into a flat cake. Such a cake looks unpresentable and unappetizing. How to make cake cream thick?
There are only two options to get out of this situation. The first involves the use of a special thickener when whipping cream, which will make the cream more dense. In the second case, it is recommended to add cream cheese to whipped cream. As a result, the consistency of the cream will become more dense. It will keep its shape well and not fall even under the weight of an elastic Victorian biscuit.
To prepare such a cream, you must first whip to steady peaks 100 ml of cream. Then add 100 g of powdered sugar and 300-400 g of cream cheese to the resulting mass. Beat the ingredients again so that the mass becomes homogeneous. This cream holds its shape perfectly, it does not have any oily taste.