Battenberg Cake

Dessert · British classic.

Ingredients

• 175g Butter
• 175g Caster Sugar
• 140g Self-raising Flour
• 50g Almonds
• ½ tsp Baking Powder
• 3 Medium Eggs
• ½ tsp Vanilla Extract
• ¼ teaspoon Almond Extract
• 175g Butter
• 175g Caster Sugar
• 140g Self-raising Flour
• 50g Almonds
• ½ tsp Baking Powder
• 3 Medium Eggs
• ½ tsp Vanilla Extract
• ¼ teaspoon Almond Extract
• ½ tsp Pink Food Colouring
• 200g Apricot
• 1kg Marzipan
• Dusting Icing Sugar

Method

1. Heat the pan — Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4 and line the base and sides of a 20cm square tin with baking parchment (the easiest way is to cross 2 x 20cm-long strips over the base).
2. Continue cooking — To make the almond sponge, put the butter, sugar, flour, ground almonds, baking powder, eggs, vanilla and almond extract in a large bowl.
3. Mix together — Beat with an electric whisk until the mix comes together smoothly.
4. Bake — Scrape into the tin, spreading to the corners, and bake for 25-30 mins – when you poke in a skewer, it should come out clean.
5. Continue cooking — Cool in the tin for 10 mins, then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling while you make the second sponge.
6. Mix together — For the pink sponge, line the tin as above. Mix all the ingredients together as above, but don’t add the almond extract.
7. Bake — Fold in some pink food colouring. Then scrape it all into the tin and bake as before. Cool.
8. Heat the pan — To assemble, heat the jam in a small pan until runny, then sieve.
9. Continue cooking — Barely trim two opposite edges from the almond sponge, then well trim a third edge.
10. Continue cooking — Roughly measure the height of the sponge, then cutting from the well-trimmed edge, use a ruler to help you cut 4 slices each the same width as the sponge height.
11. Continue cooking — Discard or nibble leftover sponge. Repeat with pink cake.
12. Continue cooking — Take 2 x almond slices and 2 x pink slices and trim so they are all the same length.

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