Victoria sponge bursting with strawberry jam and cream has been a staple at Wimbledon for decades – but now the All England Club has created a plant-based version for the first time.
The famous British cake has been transformed with Flora spread and coconut cream as part of a wider move to make the tournament more environmentally sustainable. The cake is being served to hospitality guests paying up to £2,000 a ticket.
“It’s quite an iconic English cake,” said Adam Fargin, the executive chef of the All England Club. “In our hospitality suites, traditional afternoon tea, instead of doing small cakes loaded with butter and cream, we’re doing a plant-based Victoria sponge, which is produced on site from our pastry team.
“I think it is really important to note that we make these changes based on flavour as well. So we wouldn’t serve that because it’s plant-based – we believe that it tastes as good as [any] Victoria sponge. It is really important for us that we have that balance between does it taste great and is it great for the environment.”
As part of the club’s ambition to be less wasteful, Fargin said the team had also been making banana muffins using banana skins that would ordinarily be discarded. The muffins topped with pumpkin seeds and oats are served in the players’ restaurant.
“One of the players’ favourite items of food is bananas,” Fargin said. “The banana skin, historically that would be thrown away and not thought about. Actually, that banana skin has got bags of flavour, in terms of what it can offer if you treat it the right way. It’s very nutritious, as much as the banana itself.
“These muffins are made from the banana itself and the skin. We bake them fresh every day and then we deliver that into our players’ spaces.”
About 3.3 tonnes of bananas, or about 30,000 pieces of fruit, are consumed by players during the championships.
Explaining the process of utilising the leftover skins, Fargin said: “The best way to do it is to slightly ferment them. If you take the skin and you salt them for like 24 hours under vacuum, it just starts to break down the fibres of that, which would then help with the blending. So you would blend that with the bananas, with the flour, and it turns into your muffin mix.”
In recent years Wimbledon has announced a range of sustainability measures and set ambitious targets to mitigate the climate crisis, including a commitment to reduce emissions from its operations to net zero by 2030. It has faced calls to drop Barclays as a sponsor over the bank’s ties to fossil fuels.
All dishes at the championships are provided with carbon weightings on a scale from A to E, where A means very low impact. Wimbledon said the dairy-based sponge had almost twice the carbon impact of the plant-based recipe, with a D rating, and the same carbon emissions as 123 smartphone charges. The plant-based option was rated B.
Guests in the royal box watching the Murray brothers playing doubles on Thursday included those known for their sustainability efforts. Sebastian Coe, who has warned about the impact of climate change on sport, Pat Cummins, the Australian cricketer and BBC Green Sport award winner, and Chemmy Alcott, the former professional skier who campaigns for winter sports, were due to be in attendance.
Wasteless banana muffins recipe
(Makes 20 muffins)
4 ripe bananas
2 eggs
350g caster sugar
120ml vegetable oil
5ml vanilla essence
50g sunflower seeds
225g plain flour
10g bicarbonate of soda
1 pinch of salt
Preheat the oven to 180C.
Take the bananas out of the skin and keep the skins. Place the bananas and two skins into a food processor and blend with sugar until smooth. Add the egg, vegetable oil and vanilla and blend again until smooth.
Remove the mix from the food processor and add to a large bowl. Take the two remaining banana skins and finely chop these before folding through the smooth paste.
Stir through the remaining ingredients.
Place muffin moulds in a muffin cake tin, and using the mixture fill these three-quarters of the way up allowing for the rise.
Bake for 15 minutes.
Allow to cool.
Tip: while the muffins are still a little warm, place them in a container and cover with clingfilm. This will create moisture and make the muffins particularly delicious.
