battenberg

a challenge today to make a Battenberg cake.  Never tried before, probably because I'm not a big fan of marzipan, but once that gauntlet has been thrown down...

Apparently it was made to celebrate the wedding of Queen Victoria's granddaughter - Princess Victoria of Hesse and Prince Louis of Battenberg.

So, once again I turn to Mary Berry for a recipe:

100g marg
100g caster sugar
2 eggs
**50g ground rice
 100g self-raising flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
a few drops of almond essence
red food colouring
3-4 tbsp apricot jam
225g marzipan

**I used rice flour after Googling it and discovering it's pretty much the same thing.  As far as I can tell, ground rice is slightly more course than rice flour.

Pre-heat oven to 160c and line an 18cm square cake tin with greaseproof paper.  I folded up the centre of the paper and put a piece of foil-covered cardboard in this fold to divide the tin into 2.

Cream together the marg and sugar.  Beat in the eggs then ground rice, flour, baking powder and almond essence.  Put half of the mix into the prepared tin.  Add enough red colouring to the remaining cake mix to turn it pink then put into the other side of the tin.

Bake for about 35 minutes and leave to cool.

Slice each colour into 2 equal pieces...not easy, but I found a bread knife worked best.  Stick the pieces together with warmed jam.  My apricot jam had gone mouldy (nice) so I used strawberry instead.

Leave to stick together properly for a bit then brush the sides with more jam.

Roll out the marzipan, making sure it's big enough.  I was quite anal about this and used a ruler.  Place the cake in the centre and fold the marzipan round and seal at the bottom.

Mary Berry suggests a criss-cross pattern on the top.  I dusted icing sugar onto the top and brushed off the loose sugar so it went into the cuts making them more pronounced.

Trim off the ends to give a neat finish then find someone that likes marzipan and make them eat it.

Quite please with the result but still not keen on marzipan