What I love about approaching baking this way, is that you can commit one base recipe to memory and change up the added little treat to keep it interesting – as if you are the master of 5 cake recipes! Shhh, they’ll never know!
Preheat oven to 170C / 340F
Melt your butter on a very low gentle heat and turn heat off, allowing to cool.
Wet bowl: Beat your eggs and rice syrup for 2 minutes until you can see lots of air bubbles. Use an electric beater.
Dry bowl: Put your 2 flours in, baking powder, cinnamon and vanilla (if it’s the powder… if you’re using extract, then it should be in the wet bowl) and mix through well.
Add your butter to your wet bowl now that it’s a little cooler and stir through gently.
Combine both bowls and let stand for one minute. It will thicken.
Now, add your flavour choice from above, just stirring in roughly with the spoon.
Pop into a baking paper lined loaf tin, muffin cups (mini or large), or an 18 x 24cm baking dish as I did, for a cake about an inch high. Bake for 25-40 minutes, depending on oven and cake tin size. Basically, just keep an eye and do the skewer test. It will come out clean when ready.
It’s a sturdy number, so you could bake several batches for birthday cakes and layer with whipped cream or coconut cream and cover with icing and decorate for parties too, I imagine.