Daring Bakers' Challenge: Battenberg Cake
Ingredients:
- Battenberg Cake
- 3/4 cup superfine sugar
- 1 1/4 cups self-raising flour
- 1/2 cup ground almonds
- 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
- 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, softened and cut up
- 3 large eggs at room temperature
- 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/4 teaspoon almond extract
- Red food colouring (I like to use the gel kind)
- 1/3 cup apricot jam (I used the better part of a jar)
- 1 cup Marzipan, natural or yellow (the one that I bought was wrapped up like a tootsie roll)
Instructions:
- Because this cake is two different colours, you will have to make a divider for an 8 x 8 inch cake pan. Fold a large piece of tin foil over several times as a reinforcement for the divider in your cake pan. Fold a piece of parchment paper in half and put the foil in the crease. Butter the bottom of the square cake pan, set the divider up in the center of the pan, and stick the excess parchment paper to the buttered pan.
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
- Whisk together the sugar, flour, ground almonds, and baking powder in a medium bowl. I am sure that you can buy ground almonds, but I just did it in the food processor.
- Combine the eggs, vanilla, and almond extract in a large bowl. Add the dry ingredients and beat together just until all ingredients are combined and the batter is smooth. It will be thicker and not runny like regular cake batter.
- Spoon half of the mixture into one side of the cake pan. Add a drop or two of the food colouring to the remaining cake batter and stir until the batter is a light pink colour. Spoon the pink batter into the other half of the cake pan. Smooth the surface of the batter with a spatula, making sure it reaches all corners.
- Bake for 25 to 30 minutes until the cake is well risen, springs back when lightly touched, and a toothpick comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes before turning out to cool completely on a wire rack. It'll take about an hour to cool.
- Once completely cool, trim the long edges of each half of the cake with a serrated knife.
- Cut each coloured cake in half lengthways so that you are left with four long strips of cake. They should all be the same size so trim them if necessary.
- Gently heat the apricot jam and pass through a sieve.
- Brush warmed jam onto the strips of cake to stick together in a checkered pattern.
- Dust a large flat surface with icing sugar then roll the marzipan into an oblong shape that is wide enough to cover the length of the cake and long enough to completely wrap the cake. It will be fairly thin. Brush a side of the cake with the jam, and place the cake on the marzipan, jam side down. You can put it in the middle and fold the marzipan up around it, but it is easiest to put it on one side of the marzipan and roll it. You want the seam to end up on the bottom of the cake.
- Brush the remaining three sides with jam and roll the cake to wrap it in the marzipan. Flip the cake so that the seam side is on the bottom.
- Neaten the ends of the cake and remove excess marzipan by trimming off a small bit of cake on both ends to reveal the pattern. Score the top of the cake with a knife to decorate.