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. 

Lemon Curd

I feel I have to confess that I did not make this lemon curd myself, although I did witness it being done. And I admit that that is a horribly posed photo with a raw crumpet. But I thought there would be no harm in documenting the process that my sister Cescy went through, guided by good old Nigel S for the Guardian. The recipe and article, which you should probably just read rather than this post, is here.

There was just one crucial change that we decided to make and that was to strain out the lemon zest. We just don’t like those bitty bits. Abominably fussy, I know. But the zest goes in initially, of course, because it is vital for the flavour.

This seems to be the bit when the sugar was added...

Yep, so that's it really. My only criticism of Nigel's recipe was that it only made one quite large jar of lemon curd and I think it's more fun to make a hefty batch. In our house we also like to keep it in the freezer - the combination of cold, melting lemon curd and hot toast is a real winner. It's a kind of ice cream on pancake scenario. 

Turkish Delight

Making Turkish Delight is more chemistry experiment than cookery and for that reason amazingly fun to do. The difficulty is that having made it twice, once with gelatine and once using a traditional recipe, I have not yet succeeding in creating a sweet to rival the shop bought stuff. The problem is texture related. To my mind Turkish Delight should be firmly squidgy but my latest version was described as ‘horribly soft’ – although the cubes hold their shape robustly, the oral experience is a kind of jelly meets paste scenario. Strangely moreish though.

I have not given up a finding a good Turkish Delight recipe, but I thought I would document my experience up to this point nonetheless. Research indicates that what I might be missing is mastika, a resin found in trees and traditionally cultivated on the Greek island of Chios. Apparently this is what chewing gum used to be made of so it can be used to provide a chewy bite to sweets. Although you can buy it in capsule form from health food shops in the UK it seems pretty impossible to get hold of the raw resin. So I’m planning a trip up to Green Lanes in North London to see if the Greek shops there might be able to help. I’ll update as soon as I can for all those that aren’t tempted by horribly soft Turkish Delight. Here’s a traditional recipe anyway.

Necessary equipment: electric whisk, sugar thermometer

Ingredients

800g sugar
120g corn flour
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp rose water
1 tsp cream of tartar
Few drops red or pink food colouring

For dusting
150g icing sugar
30g corn flour

1) Oil an 8’x8’ (roughly) tin, line it with baking parchment and then oil the parchment too.
2) Put 375ml water, the lemon juice and the sugar in a pan and bring to the boil whilst stirring.
3) Heat to 115C stirring all the time. Turn off heat and set aside.

4) Put 500ml water, the cream of tartar and the corn flour in another pan and bring to the boil whilst whisking all the time with the electric whisk. When it has formed a thick, gluey paste, stop.
5) Bit by bit add the sugar syrup to the corn flour paste and whisk in each addition until it is incorporated. You might want to scrape down the sides a couple of times during this process.

6) Bring the mixture to a gentle boil whilst stirring and then cook it for an hour over a low heat stirring every five minutes or so to prevent it from sticking.
7) Take off the heat and stir in the rose water and colouring.
8) Pour the mixture into the tin and leave to cool and set for a few hours.

9) Once cool remove it onto a work surface dusted with icing sugar and cut into cubes.
10) Store in Tupperware filled with icing sugar and cornflour.

After a couple of days my Turkish Delight started to lose liquid and seemed to be slowly disintegrating into a weeping, sugary morass. I rolled it again in fresh icing sugar to keep the cubes separate. I don’t quite know what the answer to this problem is, or to the question of the bizarre pasty texture, but I will keep investigating and will update soon.