Becca Jane St Clair

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[Recipe] Battenberg Cake

12218288_10153817965167160_2079031149_o I had never heard of Battenberg Cake until I moved here and I think it took several years before I even had a piece, as it’s not something I would usually pick. But Tim and I were at a cafe once and he bought one, which had me curious. Recently, Tim told me Battenberg was one of his favourite treats when he was a kid. I became inspired to try to make one myself, and today I finally did.

I will admit I did not make my own marzipan, but that’s something for me to think about trying in the future. I also did not calculate syns for this cake or use anything low fat/ low sugar as I knew I wouldn’t be keeping the cake for myself. I made today’s as a trail run for Christmas.

Battenberg Cake

You will need:

175g butter
175g golden caster sugar
3 eggs
175g self-raising flour
65g ground almond
3/4 tsp baking powder
Pink (or red) food colouring
150g apricot jam
250g ready-made marzipan (half a pack)

You also will need:

Square baking tin (20x20cm/8″x8″)
Parchment paper
Aluminium foil
Non-stick cooking spray
Small strainer (I used a tea strainer)

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1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C
2. Divide your cake tin in half. Fold a piece of foil over and over itself several times to make a thick divider the same length as your tin. Line the tin with parchment paper and then cover the foil divider with parchment paper. I used cooking spray to stick the parchment divider to the parchment liner.
3. Cream together eggs, butter, and sugar. Add eggs one at a time.
4. Combine dry ingredients and slowly add dry to wet.
5. Put HALF the batter in one side of the cake tin.
6. Add pink food colouring to the remaining batter until the batter is the shade of pink you like and pour it into the other half of the in
7. Bake 30 minutes. I rotated it after 15, but if your oven doesn’t need things to be rotated, you can skip that.
8. While the cake is baking, bring the jam to a boil and then strain it over a small bowl. Discard the apricot bits left in the strainer. Allow the jam to cool completely.
9. Remove cake from oven and cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a cooling rack and allow it to cool for about an hour.

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10. Cut each cake in half lengthwise, making 4 cake strips. Trim each strip so they are all the same size.
11. Stack the cakes. Bottom layer – one pink, one yellow. Top layer – yellow on top of pink, pink on top of yellow.
12. Use some of the apricot jam to stick the strips of cake together. Sit to one side.
13. Knead the marzipan slightly and roll out onto a floured surface (you can use icing sugar or more ground almond for this, too) until it is a rectangle large enough to cover all four sides of the cake.
14. Spread apricot jam onto the marzipan and lay the cake down onto the jam. Wrap the jam covered marzipan around the cake.
15. Trim off the excess marzipan on each edge of the cake and slightly trim the cake so you can see the checkerboard pattern.

Now what can I do with all these cake ends?!?!

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(Answer: Cake Pops!)

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  1. […] was only my second time working with marzipan (the first being the Battenburg cake), and my first time ever coating a cake with marzipan, because the Battenburg is rolled to wrap it, […]

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