Battenberg Battle

Anyone sick of renovating? I know I am – so I took a night off. Mystery DIY Man was off smacking a fluro yellow ball at another man (repeatedly), so I thought I’d do something else too. We went away for the weekend for a bit of a relax and while away I managed to watch a bit of Food TV.  I managed to tune in for one of those bake-off type shows and the challenge was to make a Battenberg Cake. I’d never heard of such a thing so I figured I should probably sit and find out what it was. Turns out it is a sponge cake (in a chequered pattern) wrapped up in marzipan. After watching a couple of disasters and successes I figured it would be an interesting experiment. What I should have probably revisited was time frame – I decided to make one of these at about 5.30pm when I had to be somewhere with said cake at 7pm.

The basis of the cake is reasonably simple, make a sponge and colour half of it, traditionally one half is pink and the other plain. Whipping up the sponge was simple enough, luckily I managed to get hold of a Battenberg Cake tin to save me a bit of time. If you can’t find a tin you can apparently just use a normal loaf tin. Once the sponge is all cooked you have to try and cut each piece into an even square log. Coat each of the logs with apricot jam and stick them together to form a two by two square. Roll the square in some rolled out mazipan and trim the edges so it looks neat (simple…).

My first attempt has a few funnies, I rolled the icing out a bit thin so it didn’t look quite as smooth as it should have done. But I am going to try again and this time make a blueberry sponge and a lemon sponge – Otago colours. Fingers crossed round 2 goes just as well.

 

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