The overall finish of my Family Fruit cake was excellent. It was golden and crispy brown at the top in relation to appearance. It gave off a wonderful aroma of freshly baked sponge cake when it was being baked.

The sponge was light yellow or pale in colour. The sponge was well risen because the size of the cake was fairly thick. The appearance was golden brown with a crispy touch which made my cake more appealing. It was light, crumbly and soft in texture and the flavour of my sponge was sweet and it wasn’t eggy.  Those were all the good points of the cake but the bad point was that when I spooned the mixture into the baking tray, it had some dry flour in the middle which wasn’t mixed in with the rest because of the mixture being too thick with all the fruits. The sponge didn’t stick to the tray once it was ready; this was a good thing because it came out easily because I had glazed it well.

I asked a number of people to taste and test my sandwich cake in relation to appearance, flavour/taste and texture using the two sensory evaluation tests:

• Descriptive testing/profiling
• Rating

RATING TEST:

KEYS:

1= LIKE EXTREMELY                                2=LIKE A LOT

3= 0.K                                4=DISLIKE A LOT

5= DISLIKE EXTREMELY

DESCRIPTIVE/PROFILING TEST:

The average score of my rating test (using ten testers) was 4.3. This is a good overall score because it actually shows that people liked my cake a lot.

The profiling test was a great success because all my points were on either 4 or 5 which shows that no one disliked my cake. I have plotted the results on to the star profile that were produced by 5 testers.

I did not encounter any major problems during the production of my cake. The only problem was mixing the actual mixture. Because it was hard for me to combine all the ingredients together because the mixture was indeed very heavy with all the fruits which resulted some flour being left in the middle without being mixed with the rest of the mixture. The disadvantage of the cake was that it took a lot of time to bake in the oven but it took very little time to prepare the mixture.

The other problem that I suffered was lining the grease proof paper into the tin. The lining process was confusing because we had to grease, line with a thick strip of grease proof paper all the way round the tin, grease again and then again line with a circular greaseproof paper and gain just grease all over.

If I were to make or produce the cake again, I would add a little spice into the mixture to give it a piquant and a spicy flavour which would change its taste slightly. I could also add a zest of orange to improve its flavour or maybe I could even change its shape to a square to change its appearance.