Method

Preheat the oven to 160 C. Lightly grease two cake tins with a 22 cm diameter.

Sift all the dry ingredients together into a mixing bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix the buttermilk, oil, vinegar, vanilla essence and food colouring together. Lightly beat the eggs and add them to the wet ingredients. Mix well.

Now combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients and mix until combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake tins and bake for 1 hour. Remove from the oven and leave to cool.

Cream cheese icing

Cream the butter and icing sugar together and add the vanilla essence. Add the cream cheese and beat together (take care not to overbeat as this causes the cream cheese to become runny).

Sandwich the cakes together with half the icing and use the other half to ice the top of the cake

Swiss Meringue topping

Separate the egg whites into a spotlessly clean metal or glass bowl.

Add the castor sugar.

Place the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (the bowl must not touch the water as you don’t want the eggs to scramble).

Whisk gently until the sugar has dissolved (you can test this by rubbing the mixture between two fingers, it should be smooth with no more sugar granules)

Remove from the heat and beat with electric beater, slowly at first, for 2 minutes and then on high speed for about 4-5 minutes until the mixture becomes glossy and stiff

Roughly pile onto the cake and smooth over with a palette knife.

The icing can be left at this stage but it looks lovely if scorched very gently with a blowtorch to caramelise the meringue.