Let Them Eat (Battenberg) Cake

Sara and I are not known for the beauty of our baked goods. Tastiness, perhaps. Beauty, not so much. But we pulled it together for this challenge and managed to turn out a Battenberg Cake that looked pretty much like it was supposed to.

The cake recipe itself was relatively easy -- pretty standard cake with almond flavoring.

We successfully created our faux-Battenberg pan.

And successfully filled one side with yellow cake and the other with pink.

Things went slightly awry in the oven when we ended up with under-cooked cake that had to be hastily returned to the oven. Highly unusual for my oven, which typically runs way too hot and burns things. We have yet to bake a cake together where nothing goes wrong and this time we had no frosting with which to fill in the holes.

Fortunately, we did have marzipan (incidentally, the name of my sister's new kitten).

Yep, nothing like marzipan to wrap over our cakes, which looked a bit worse for the wear.

Sara beautifully scored the top of the marzipan...

... and trimmed the edges.

Ta-da!

We enjoyed slices of our Battenberg Cake while watching very entertaining Daily Show coverage of the Queen's Jubilee. All we were missing was some tea, and perhaps some finger sandwiches.

Mandy of What The Fruitcake?! came to our rescue last minute to present us with the Battenberg Cake challenge! She highlighted Mary Berry’s techniques and recipes to allow us to create this unique little cake with ease.