Making a Battenburg Cake

Ingredients for Battenburg cake; cookbook at bottom left, with a picture of the cake, sliced.

Battenburg cake is a very British dessert, a favorite at tea time.  It has a distinctive appearance – it’s an oblong loaf-type cake, covered in white marzipan; when sliced, each piece is a pink and yellow checkerboard!  According to Wikipedia (dare we trust that source?), the cake was created about 1884 when Queen Victoria’s granddaughter married the Prince of Battenberg.  The four checkerboard squares of the cake are supposed to represent the four princes of Battenberg.


Note in the paragraph above, the variant spelling of Battenburg.  Sometimes the cake name is spelled with an “e;” sometimes, with a “u.”  The place in Germany is with an “e.”

I first saw Battenburg cake on one of my favorite British TV food shows – The Hairy Bikers: Mums Know Best.  It features two hairy biker guys who ride around the English (and Welsh) countryside looking for fabulous food created by local housewives.  The bikers are Simon King and Dave Myers.  Neither one is a professional chef – they’re both just cute, avid foodies with lots of personality.  Their shows are informative and hilarious!

Anyway, the first time I ever heard of Battenburg cake was on one of the Hairy Bikers shows.  The guys actually made one.  It appealed to me because it involves not just mixing things together, but assembling various bits of the dish.  I love putting edible things together.  One of my favorite appetizers is asparagus and ham roll-ups, where you have to cut slices of bread, flatten them with a rolling pin and roll up asparagus/ham bundles in them.  This Battenburg cake was a bit more complicated – it intrigued me.  So, I decided to give it a go!

The recipe I used is in The Sainsbury Book of Teatime Favourites by Brian Binns (shown in first photo).  Sainsbury's is a major supermarket chain in the U.K., so I figured the recipe should work.  It does seem to skimp a bit on the amount of flour and sugar -- but it is a teacake, not a big monster 3-layered baby!

After you mix up the batter, you divide it in half and add a little red food coloring to one half (to make it pink).  Then you divide a loaf pan using aluminum foil, so you'll have 2 separate skinny loaves.

Then you bake it for about 30 minutes.

Let the loaves cool completely, then take them out of the foil.  Arrange them in checkerboard fashion -- using apricot jam to make them stick together.  Then, and here's the tricky part, roll out some marzipan (almond paste) and wrap the cake up in it.  Then use a fork to make lines in the marzipan.  Here's what I ended up with:

Admittedly, it's a bit misshapen!  My loaf pans were too long.  I could have tried to cut off the tops of the cake to make them lay better on top of each other.  I had a sliver, and the cake's pretty good; just sorry it looks so "rustic."  I left it on the table with a note.  Hopefully it'll get eaten by tonight!