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.

This was my first month doing a Daring Baker challenge after moving and it was so fun! I can’t believe I stopped doing them for a while! I’m back at it people – though I am a day late for posting! Eep!!

I have seen Battenberg cakes before but I had never made one until yesterday! It’s always fun and rewarding to make something difficult and come out on top! I took it one step further (because duh, of course I would) and I made the fondant myself too! Recipes like this make me miss Toronto, because my mother would have loved to see! I sent her a picture, but it’s not the same as seeing my masterpiece in person! When I first read this recipe I was a little scared to be honest and now I’m bummed out that I didn’t make several versions of this over the month to make a lovely epic post about all the different ways we Battenberg’ed it up in June. Next month, that’s the plan.

I used the recipe Mandy supplied, an altered version of Mary Berry’s Battenberg recipe. It was super, super easy to make and really good! It sprang up exactly as it should and that always makes me happy. I want to make vanilla/chocolate versions, strawberry/chocolate versions, mint/chocolate verions and and and I’d like to use ganache as the glue instead of the apricot jam (or use strawberry jam in a strawberry version). The possibilities are pretty much endless!

First, make a tin foil wall for your pan so you have that rectangle shape. Super simple, then start on the batter. I was reading that the ‘drop it all in one bowl’ technique worked really well here, so that’s what I did.
After I put half of the batter in half of the pan, I added a few drops of red food coloring to the rest. Then I started on the fondant! The fondant was super simple. You need 1lb of mini marshmallows, a few drops of water, 2lbs of icing sugar and something to grease your hands with (I used butter).
Melt the marshmallows with a little water in a double boiler and then drop the mass of melted goo onto a seriously greased up counter top or cookie sheet or whatever. Then dump the icing sugar on top of the goo and knead it the way you’d knead bread!
Kneading the fondant takes a while so by the time I was done the cakes were ready. Let them cool in the pan for a bit, then let them cool completely. I stacked them to cut them into their four long squares.
Heat the jam in a double boiler and then press through a sieve or small strainer to get all the bits out.
Then glue your cake pieces together with the jam and roll out your fondant!
Place the cake (with jam glue on the bottom) on the fondant, then brush more jam on the cake and wrap the fondant around it! This is kinda tricky.
Then I used the back of a knife to make the traditional scores on the top of the cake!