At long last

I am not noted for my baking skills. As a teenager, I was able to turn out perfectly acceptable queen cakes, and I could make terrific apple and cinnamon cakes from my Blue Peter recipe book. In my early twenties I did a mean banana loaf and a great chocolate sponge. And then I stopped baking for about 15 years and completely lost the knack. Over the last year I have tried again with disasterous results - the two most memorable failures being a carrot cake which was so saturated with oil that it ended up deep frying itself in the oven, and a Pistachio Coffee Cake which not only tasted of neither of those two ingredients but was also as dry as sand. So it was with trepidation that I embarked on tonight's challenge - a Lemon Victoria Sandwich with Lemon Curd and Limoncello filling, to take up to a camping weekend with friends tomorrow night. I'd taken advice on my usual problem - that of hard baked crusts around the outside of my cakes (apparently my oven must be a fast one, so I had to turn the temperature down ten degrees) and this is what they came out looking like. All seems good so far - at long last a cake that's OK?! - though the crux, of course, is always when you first cut into it and see that everything on the inside is alright - and that's not going to happen until tomorrow. Couldn't even take a photo of the finished and assembled article because these are still warm as midnight approaches and can't be filled and dusted until they're cool. Fingers crossed that they are edible - the cake mixture definitely tasted good anyway!