Raffaello Coconut and White Chocolate Cake

Splitting a 22cm sponge into three equal layers by eye, on a normal kitchen worktop with a bread knife, is the part people dread and shouldn't. The trick isn't skill, it's patience: let the sponge cool completely — properly cold, not just "not hot" — before you touch a knife to it. A warm sponge compresses and tears under the blade; a cold one shears cleanly. If your knife keeps dragging, you're cutting too early, not cutting wrong. A length of cotton thread pulled through the sponge works better than any knife if you have one to hand, but it's not essential.

The milk-soak is doing a specific job: a baked sponge, on its own, drinks like a dry sponge (the pun is unavoidable). Milk — plain, whatever's in the fridge for tea — rehydrates it just enough that each layer is moist without collapsing into mush. Go gently with a spoon or pastry brush rather than pouring; too much milk and the layers slump under the cream's weight once stacked, and the whole cake leans. "To taste" in the ingredients list really means "until the sponge feels damp under your finger, not wet."

On the cream: mascarpone is there for body and a clean dairy flavour, not sweetness — that's why icing sugar is added separately rather than relying on the chocolate. White chocolate brings its own sugar and fat, which is why it's melted and cooled before going in — hot chocolate meeting cold mascarpone will seize and streak, so let it come down to just-warm first, the temperature your lip would call "fine" rather than "hot." The chopped almonds and wafers aren't decorative; they give the cream some bite and stop it reading as one uniform mousse all the way through. If you can't get vanilla wafers, any plain, not-too-sweet biscuit crushed small does the same structural job — it's filler for texture, not a flavour you're chasing.

Whipping the double cream separately and folding it in, rather than beating everything together, is the one step that actually protects the cake. Overwork cream once it's mixed with mascarpone and chocolate and it can split — you'll see it go grainy and loose instead of holding peaks. Folding keeps the air you've whipped in intact, which is what gives you a cream light enough to spread without crushing the sponge beneath it, but firm enough to hold three layers upright. If you've no double cream, any cream with enough fat to whip to soft peaks will do — single cream won't, and that's not a shortcut worth taking.

Any flavourless oil doesn't come into this recipe, but the same logic applies to the butter you grease the tin with: use something with no character of its own, because at 180°C anything strongly flavoured just adds smoke and smell, not taste, to a sponge that's meant to stay neutral.

Last point, and it's the one people skip: the fridge rest isn't storage, it's assembly. A freshly stacked cake is a landslide waiting to happen — cold firms the cream, lets the layers bond to each other, and is what lets you slice it cleanly rather than watching it slide sideways on the plate. Give it the time in the cold before you cut it; that wait is doing work, not just holding the cake until teatime. This feeds ten reasonably, more if it follows a Sunday roast and nobody's that hungry.