Battenberg Cake

The excellent thing about Battenberg is the ratio of sponge to marzipan. The pink and yellow chequered sponge is, to my mind, just a vehicle for all that almondy squidginess. But it is also visually lovely – a pretty, delicate tea-time cake.

However my boyfriend Jack wanted to take the Battenberg to another level. It was his colleague Emma’s birthday and he had an ambitious vision of a Battenberg that contained an ‘E’ in pink sponge. The result was an enormous, weighty brick of a Battenberg. But although it might have lost some of its traditional elegance, and the sponge to marzipan ratio was not quite what one would hope, this was a very fun cake to make.

We used Sarah Cook’s recipe for the BBC, which we chose because it contains ground almonds, crucial to creating a dense, squidgy sponge. The comment I will make about this recipe is that it makes A LOT of cake. In addition to the ‘E’ Brickenberg that we made, I then made a second Battenberg, virtually the same size, out of just the off cuts, plastered together with apricot jam. My advice would be to either halve the quantities or make two cakes. If you don’t do this then you will end up with a very long skinny cake. A snake, if you will.     

I have re-written and simplified the recipe, and chucked in a few iphone photos at the bottom for reference…

Ingredients

350g soft butter

350g caster sugar

280g self-raising flour

100g ground almonds

1 tsp baking powder

6 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

½ tsp almond extract

Red food colouring

Yellow food colouring

1kg white marzipan

Apricot jam

1)      Pre-heat the oven to 180C and line two rectangular tins with baking paper.

2)      Put the first eight ingredients into a blender and whizz.

3)      Split equally into two bowls and add red food colouring to one, and yellow to another. Stir and add until you have the right colour.

4)      Put the two cake mixtures into the tins and bake for 25-30 mins.

5)      When cooked, leave the cakes to cool.

6)      Slice up the sponge into long square strips and arrange in a chequered pattern or in any way you like.

7)      Brush your cake construction with apricot jam and then roll the marzipan tightly around it. Trim the ends to reveal the perfect Battenberg cross-section.