And Then: There Was Cake...: Pizza Cake!

This is a bit like a lasagna... but with pizza layers instead of pasta sheets and pizza topping instead of meat/vegetables and white sauce.

I'm not advocating this as a regular meal, but it is delicious.

Serves: 6, with a salad.
Time to make: 2 hours

For the dough:
- 600g white bread flour
- 2 tsp yeast
- 2 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp oil
- 400ml water

^ These quantities actually depend on the size of your cake tin. Mine was 23 cm in diameter and the pizza cake filled it to the top.

For the sauce:
- 1 medium onion
- 3 cloves garlic
- 3 carrots
- 1 tin tomatoes
- some sundried tomatoes (5/6)
- some whole tomatoes (~4 large ones)
- basil

For the filling:

- mozzarella cheese
- salami slices
- anything else you like the sound of, e.g. olives
(nothing too wet or it will make the dough soggy)

Preheat oven to gas mark 6, 200C (I find people know how long their ovens take to warm up so I'm putting this at the beginning so you know in advance)

1. Chop the onions, garlic and carrots into smallish pieces.
2. Make the sauce. Fry the onion, carrots and garlic until soft. Add the tin of tomatoes and some basil and other seasonings. Leave to simmer. (I do this to make sure it is thick and not watery).

The image on the left is before I added the tomatoes, which is why it doesn't look much like tomato sauce...

3. Meanwhile, make the dough. Put the flour in a large bowl and add the yeast and salt. Make a well in the middle and add the water and oil. Mix with a spoon until it starts to come together, then get in with your hands and roll it into a ball. No need to leave to prove, etc. as it's pizza dough

4. Divide the ball into two. Take the first ball and divide into three. Roll each ball into a circle the same diameter as your cake tin. I used the removable base as a guide but you could probably trace round the outside of the cake tin as the dough does shrink inwards a little, I found.

5. Blind bake these three bases for 15 minutes at 200C, gas mark 6.

6. Hopefully your sauce is thickening up by now. Cut up the whole tomatoes and sundried tomatoes and add them. Cook for 5 mins then blend to smooth.

7. Roll out the other half of the dough and use it to fill the sides of the cake tin. My dough came out strangely wet and I ended up smearing it around the sides. So when it came to removing it from the tin it was a bit tricky (it was stuck to the sides), but mine still worked which shows you can go a bit wrong without messing up 100%

8. Place the first base in the bottom. I used the largest so it sealed the gap nicely and no sauce could leak out.

9. Cover the base with the sauce and toppings.

You can see a mistake I made in this photo, by not putting the side-dough up to the top. This is because I thought it wouldn't reach that far. It did.