Home-made Battenberg cake is a wonderful combination of soft, slightly almondy, sponge set out in the characteristic chequerboard arrangement, lightly tangy apricot jam which acts as a glue to keep the sponge and wrapping together, and a generous outside layer of pale gold marzipan.
This is my version. It’s a ‘Battenberg’, not a ‘Battenburg’, because that’s the spelling I recall from childhood, and it’s a very large one. I am pathologically unable to make anything of average size and my heart sank when I came across a couple of recipes for a teeny-tiny cake which would never feed a family of Brockets. So here we have it, a home-made, family-size Battenberg cake.
makes 1 large cake
225g/8oz caster sugar
225g/8oz soft butter
4 large eggs
20g/7oz self-raising flour
50g/2oz ground almonds
half a teaspoon baking powder
few drops almond essence (optional)
pink or red food colouring
apricot jam
approx 1lb/450g golden marzipan
- Preheat the oven to 170 C/gas mark 3.
- Grease two loaf tins approx 21cm/8” long, 12cm/4.5” wide, 6cm/2.5” deep.
- First make a basic sponge mixture. Cream the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs one after the other. Add almond essence if using. Sift in the flour, almonds and baking powder and fold in gently.
- Spoon half the mixture into one loaf tin and level the surface with the back of the spoon. Now add food colouring to the rest of the mix in the bowl until it turns a good pink colour.
- Spoon into the second tin and level.
- Bake both tins for 30-40 mins until a skewer comes out clean (check after 25 mins). Leave to cool and turn out.
- You now need to make four strips of cake. Using a sharp knife, cut each sponge loaf in half and trim so that each side and edge is straight and the four pieces are more or less equal.
- Warm the apricot jam so that it is easy to brush onto the sponge.
- Roll out the marzipan on a surface dusted with icing sugar. It needs to be long enough and wide enough to be wrapped round the cake.
- ‘Glue’ the four pieces of sponge by brushing the connecting sides of the strips with apricot jam then pressing together. You should now have a long, square cake with yellow and pink squares in a chequerboard pattern.
- Brush the outside with jam and carefully wrap the marzipan round, leaving the join to go underneath.
- Trim the two ends so that the sponge squares show to full effect.
- Knit matching tea-cosy and make pot of tea.
