Happy Thursday everyone! Welcome back for Week 6!
On the menu for today is the Battenburg Cake! It looks just as fancy as it sounds! It’s an almond-flavored cake that uses two colored batters to create a checkerboard pattern before being brushed with apricot jam and wrapped in almond paste (similar to marzipan).
Hi! Future Hunter here: As you can see from the title picture, this one wasn’t a win. Read on to see where it all went downhill, ha-ha!
First and foremost, this week has been a little different than normal. So far, I’m on day six of my 10-day Covid quarantine! Woo-hoo (she said sarcastically)! I’m racing against the symptom clock today, because although by boyfriend has lost his sense of taste, I still have mine. I want to make sure I can taste the cake to review it properly! With that, let’s get to it!
This is a dump cake, so you throw it all in a bowl and mix, which we all know I like very much! The ingredients are all pretty typical except for ground rice. Now, thankfully we had some rice in the house, but it definitely wasn’t ground rice. I decided the food processor would be my best bet, and BOY was I wrong! I ran the processor for about a minute, and it didn’t seem to be doing anything, so I tried the old Zip-Lock baggie and rolling pin method. Wrong again! This just about destroyed the baggie, so I went back to the food processor and ran it for at least 5 minutes. This barely did anything, but it gave off a teensy bit of powder, so I put the rest of the rice in a sifter and used whatever I could. It probably turned out to be about a teaspoon. Maybe a mortar and pestle would work well?
Thankfully, the lack of ground rice didn’t seem to affect the batter’s consistency, and it turned out to be slightly thicker than a box-made cake batter. I left the butter out all night this time, and that seemed to help slightly with reducing butter chunks, but my old foes still stuck around!
The fun part about this cake is that you split the batter into two and color one of the halves pink. Then, you’re supposed to put the two halves in the pan side by side. Now, my brain wanted to make things a little more difficult – I know, shocker, haha! – and I decided to try to make a little wall in between the two colors so they wouldn’t mush together while baking.
The recipe called for 35-40 minutes in the oven, but going along with my trials (and, so far, errors) to try to stop the cake-sinking problem, I checked the cake after 20 minutes. Side note: I also reduced the amount of baking powder by half. To my dismay, my wall had been overrun by the “plain” colored batter, and the pink batter wasn’t putting up much of a defense. The cake wasn’t cooked completely either, so back into the oven it went for another 5 minutes. After a total of 25 minutes in the oven, the cake was cooked through. After flipping it out of the tin to cool on a wire rack, I noticed the bottom looked nice and even, unlike the deceiving top.
The next step was to make almond paste to cover the cake, which is an alternative to marzipan. You can apparently buy pre-made almond paste, but if you live in a teeny town that’s several hours from a city with 21st century resources like me, Mary provides a recipe for you!
Now this recipe called for ground almonds, and as with the ground rice in the batter, my food processor didn’t do too much, so the almonds were more finely-chopped than grinded into a powder. I think this may have been the downfall of the almond paste. The paste was way too sticky, so I tried to add flour (ended up being about 1.5 cups), but it didn’t help much. I was able to roll it out into a sheet (like if you were about to cut out cookies), but when I tried to roll it up over the cake, it stuck to the table, itself, the knife I was using, essentially everything but the cake itself. The apricot jam was supposed to act like a “glue” for the cakes to stick to each other and the almond paste, but that didn’t really work either. So, I ended up with a bit of a mess.
I try not to get frustrated with these bakes, but this was definitely one of those times where I wanted to throw in the towel and quit. I pushed my frustrations aside and tasted the monstrosity, and it wasn’t too bad! Well, the cake wasn’t bad, ha-ha, the almond paste, however… we don’t have to talk about it. In all seriousness, the almond paste tasted like overly sweet almonds, and the grainy, slightly chunky texture was pretty bad as well. The apricot jam had all but vanished, so next time I’ll put more on and see how that works.
Overall, I’ll give this recipe a 3/5. The cake was easy enough to make, and turned out pretty tasty. If I had the opportunity to buy pre-made almond paste, I think that would’ve been a game changer. All we can do now is laugh it off and start fresh next week!
I’ll be trying this recipe again sometime, but for now, I’m going to take a break from the good ‘ol Battered Battenburg.
That’s it for week six, the Battenburg! Thank you for following along with me, and, again, if you have any questions, feel free to use the “Get in Touch” feature on my “About Me” page and subscribe to get updates on posts!
See you next week!
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