Week 9 - Cakes: Coffee and Walnut Battenburg

The start of my blog for 2013 has been some what hindered by my 9 month old son tipping an entire cup of coffee over the laptop which killed it instantly. However I am now up and running again a few weeks later then planned and ready to take on my next set of baking challenges.

The first recipe that I have to make for 2013 from the "How to Bake" book is a Coffee and Walnut Battenburg cake. After baking so many things at Christmas that required mixed dried fruit its going to be a nice change this week to make a sponge cake.
I am not a fan of the white and pink version of the Battenburg cake that you find in the supermarket so I'm hoping that the "How to Bake" recipe will alter my low opinion of this cake.

The mixture

The first thing that the recipe instructed me to do was to prepare the cake tin as I had to split the tin into two separate halves using baking paper. I cut out a rectangle of paper that was 20cm by 28cm and put this into the tin as the lining. I then pinched up the paper in the middle of the tin which created a pleat about 4cm in height which will act as the divider between the vanilla and coffee-walnut sponge mixtures.

Compared to a Victoria Sponge cake, the Battenburg cake mixture is very simply to make because all I had to was put the butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder and ground almonds into the mixing bowl and beat with a wooden spoon until all the ingredients were combined. To make the separate sponges, I split the cake mixture into two, putting one half of the mixture into another bowl. For the vanilla sponge I added a few drops of vanilla essence and 1 1/2 half teaspoons of milk to one of the bowls of mixture. To the other bowl, I added the ground coffee, mixed with 1 1/2 half teaspoons of milk and chopped walnuts.

The vanilla sponge and the coffee-walnut sponge

I then spooned the coffee and walnut mixture into one half of the cake tin and the vanilla mixture into the other half.  I had to make sure that my pleat of paper that divided the two mixtures was straight and in the middle of the tin so as to ensure that the sponges would end up roughly the same size.

The two sponges ready for the oven

I baked my cake at Gas Mark 3 in the oven for 40 minutes until the sponges were springy to the touch and had shrunk away from the sides of the tin. Thomas awoke from his nap not long after I took the cake out of the oven so I was not able to continue with the next step of the recipe until a few hours later.

The baked cake

Once the two sponges were removed from the tin, I trimmed off any rough edges with a sharp knife and cut each sponge lengthways into two equal strips.

The strips of sponges

I then had to make the butter icing that would join each strip of sponge together to create the chequerboard effect. In a cup I mixed together 1/2 a teaspoon of coffee granules with 1 1/2 teaspoons of milk until all of the coffee had dissolved. I added this coffee mixture to the icing sugar and butter in the mixing bowl and beat the ingredients together until a smooth mixture was created.

To create the cake I put a vanilla sponge strip next to a coffee-walnut strip and stuck them together using some of the butter icing. I spread some more of the icing on top of the two strips and stuck the remaining two strips on top. Now that the cake was assembled, I covered the top of the sponge with more of the icing in readiness to be covered in marzipan.  My vanilla sponge had not risen as high as the coffee-walnut sponge which caused my assembled cake to become lopsided on one side!!!

The assembled cake

I rolled out the marzipan to a rectangle shape that was the length of my cake and wide enough to wrap around the whole cake. First I laid the iced side of the cake on one of the ends of the marzipan and then covered the other three sides of the cake with the remaining icing. I rolled the cake over in the marzipan, gently pressing down as it turned so that the marzipan stuck to the cake.

The lopsided cake in marzipan

I trimmed the marzipan where the two ends met to create a neat join and turned the cake over so that the join was underneath. Next the recipe instructed me to trim a small slice of each end of the cake to neaten it and show off the chequerboard effect. As I had rather a lot f marzipan left, I decided to decorate the top of the cake with small marzipan balls instead of walnut pieces as the recipe says. For the finishing touches, I crimped the edges of the marzipan along the top with my fingers and dusted the cake with icing sugar.

My finished Battenburg cake

The verdict
The "How to Bake" version of this cake completely won me over and I shall be adding this Battenburg cake to my list of recipes that I want to make again. This delightfully light and tasty cake is the perfect partner with a cup of tea in the afternoon.

Next Week's Baking Challenge:

Biscuits: Walnut Crumbles