Mini Battenbergs
As a regular watcher of the Great British Bakeoff the technical challenges always looked interesting to me as they exposed me to "standard British bakes" that I had no idea existed. As person that generally seeks out new foods (Have you ever tried gooseneck barnacles? They are amazing!) and a person that loves desserts this is exciting to watch and imagine what they would be like. Last season I found out they post actual good versions of these recipes (not the hand wave ones the contestants are subjected to) and was inspired by Quantumgirlcooks to start trying my hand at them.
So this year we kick off with "Mini Battenbergs." I've seen Battenberg cakes on the show before. The checkboard cake with marzipan wrapping it, and that they have custom pans to try and make it easy t make and get consistent size pieces.
If you want to try it the recipe exists. But... I don't suggest it. The hero shot of my results:
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| Impossible to tell the difference! Yeah I only ended up with 4 rather than 8. |
So my notes on this recipe.
It's very very sweet. There is 1.65 POUNDS of sugar in 8 cakes. 2.5 cans of coke per "mini cake" with nothing really to cut it. As a person with a sweet tooth, I still thought this thing was terrible.
Secondly it's got almonds and almond extract and it's just almond on almond flavor. The mini size means that the marzipan also is incredibly dominating, and that's even with mine having more cake then the recipe wants.
Seriously don't make these terrible things.
If you still want to (don't) and you are American you also need to translate the recipe.
The sugars are fairly easy (caster sugar -> superfine baking sugar, icing sugar -> powdered sugar).
I was not able to track down "jam sugar." It's apparently a sugar/acid/pectin blend to make jam easy. Online suggestions seem to be to use "Sure Jell" instaead and I found that. But I just bought apricot jam as I also couldn't even source apricots at this time of year and it was not a main part of the recipe. (It's just a thin brushing on the inside of the marzipan.)
The "Self-rising flour" appears to be AP flour + Baking soda + salt, I used King Arthur Baking's recipe.
For pink food coloring I used 12 drops red and 4 drops blue to get "dusty rose" as suggested by the food coloring box.
For the almonds "ground almonds" should be read as "blanched superfine almond flour." The wildly different color of my marzipan is a result of not realizing I'd need the blanched part and the store I was in only had the unblanched ones. (This under specification of recipes is always captivating to me. My fun example is always is "eggs" like in 400 years will it be obvious that there is an implied chicken? And that the the expected weight is 2oz?)
Next up the pan, the recipe wants a 17cm square cake tin. I can't find this. I've found 18cm and 6", but can't find 17cm. I had an 8in square, and yeah this is 42% larger in area. And yeah that causes issues later. But it's what I used.
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In my search of a cake tin of the right size I did find this configurable one and I'm pretty tempted to get it. Oh yeah they also sell a Battenberg specific one. Which of course is for the full size version.
The result was that the recipe expects a very specific resulting sponge size and the slicing directions just list specific cuts to make but as mine was the wrong the size the slice across the middle did not result in usable pieces:
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So there was a bit of leftover cake. And honestly this was tasty, so almond flavored cake good idea!
The next steps were these overly specified mechanism for icing the cake bits and honestly I think they should have just said something like take four pieces arrange in checker board ice the inside surfaces, the actual text "spreading all sides with buttercream to stick them together and give a chequerboard effect" meant I covered the outside:
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| Yeah I would have done better if I had ignored the direction and just followed the photo. |
Which ended up using all the icing up even though make half the number of cakes.
The marzipan seemed to work out okay, but not sure why we needed almond extract in this it's half almonds already.
I was very surprised by how much oil came out of the marzipan as rolling it there was notable pooling, not sure what's up with that. I might try making Marzipan again just to see if without the extract and the blanched almonds if it's better.
Well that's week one, next week Cookies! (Er Biscuits I guess)
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