Battenberg Cake

This recipe is a secret favourite of mine – it’s really girly (well, it’s pink!) and tastes amazing with a well-deserved cup of tea. With a saucer. None of your “made in a mug” stuff! Traditionally eaten around Easter, this is a special treat! This recipe is adapted from a BBC Good Food recipe found here. I found that the sponges needed longer in the oven to get the skewer to come out clean (the first time I tried, the cake needed nearly 40 minutes!).

This recipe makes two cakes. Alternatively, use one portion of the sponge mix, and use a special Battenberg cake tin (with metal inserts to separate each section, like this one here) and split it in two – one without food colouring but add the almond extract, and the other with pink food colouring and no almond extract.

Ingredients

For Almond Sponge	For the Pink Sponge
175g very soft butter	1 x almond sponge mix
175g golden caster sugar	Pink food colouring
140g self-raising flour
50g ground almonds	To assemble:
½ tsp baking powder	200g apricot jam
3 medium eggs	500g white marzipan
½ tsp vanilla extract	Icing sugar (for dusting)
¼ tsp almond extract

Method:

Preheat your oven to 160°c and line the base of a 20cm square tin with baking parchment, and grease the sides.

To make the almond sponge, put the butter, sugar, flour, ground almonds, baking powder, eggs, vanilla and almond extract in a large bowl. Beat with an electric whisk until the mix comes together smoothly.

Scrape into the prepared tin, spreading to the corners, and bake for 30-35 mins. When poked in a skewer, it should come out clean. Cool in the tin for around 10 mins until it shrinks back from the sides of the tin, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling while you make the second sponge.

For the pink sponge, line the tin as above. Mix all the ingredients together as above, but don’t add the almond extract. Fold in some pink food colouring (I used a gel colouring in Rose, and used a cocktail stick to add small amounts at a time) and ensure it’s thoroughly and evenly mixed, then scrape it all into the prepared tin and bake as before.

Add small amounts of Food Colouring Gel at a time

Mix the food colouring evenly into the Battenberg Cake batter

To assemble, heat the jam until it’s runny, then sieve it to get any lumps or peel out (you want it to be a fine thin jam). Barely trim two opposite edges from the almond sponge, then well trim a third edge. Roughly measure the height of the sponge, then cutting from the well-trimmed edge, use a ruler to help you cut 4 slices each the same width as the sponge height. Discard or nibble leftover sponge. Repeat with the pink sponge.

Assemble your Battenberg slices on the marzipan

Assemble the final two slices, alternating the colours, on top and roll the marzipan around the cake

Take 2 x almond slices and 2 x pink slices and trim so they are all the same length. Roll out one marzipan block on a surface lightly dusted with icing sugar to just over 20cm wide, then keep rolling lengthways until the marzipan is roughly 0.5cm thick. Brush with apricot jam, then lay a pink and an almond slice side by side at one end of the marzipan, brushing jam in between to stick the sponges together, and leave 4cm clear marzipan at the end. Brush more jam on top of the sponges, then sandwich the remaining 2 slices on top, alternating colours to give a checkerboard effect. Trim the marzipan to the length of the cakes.

Carefully lift up the marzipan and smooth over the cake with your hands, but leave a small marzipan fold along the bottom edge before you stick it to the first side. Trim opposite side to match size of fold, then crimp edges using fingers and thumb (or, more simply, press with prongs of fork). If you like, mark 10 slices using the prongs of a fork. As this method makes two cakes, assemble the second cake and store it for when you’ve fast run out of the first cake!