Battenberg cake

Recently, I have been exposed to a chocolate bar that had two colors - a pink one and a white one. It reminded me of a cake I made almost two years ago. It too mixed pink and white and what's more, it was coated in a delicious layer of apricot jam and marzipan.

Today, I tried making a slightly modified Battenberg cake, using 70% of a traditional recipe with some ingredients (rum and coconut) that you normally don't find in it. Also I used different coloring since Prague decided not to have any shops selling food coloring open on weekend and they had only yellow at Tesco. Durrr.
Anyway, for my version, I used a high quality marzipan that was both expensive and sold in small packages. That's why my layer of marzipan is so thin. It should be thicker like on the last picture (that's the one I made years ago) but it doesn't really matter since it's there mainly to hold the constructed cake together. And one more thing, it might not be a bad idea putting more than 4 spoons of rum in it. Its taste was almost indistinguishable and the aroma was merely slightly there.


Battenberg cake
you will need:

• 200g butter 
• 150g white sugar
• 25g vanilla sugar
• 2 eggs
• 185g white flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 60ml milk, approximately
• food colouring, yellow in my case
• 4 spoons of rum
• 5 teaspoons of dry coconut
• apricot jam (no berry jam)
• almond paste or marzipan to cover 

1. Cream the butter, vanilla and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Sift the flour, baking powder and fold into the creamed mixture. Add sufficient milk to give the dough a soft constitution.
2. Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius and line a shallow cake tin (22x18 cm works well) with parchment paper.
3. Separate the dough into two equal parts. In a bowl, mix half of the dough with rum and coconut. Mix the food colour into the other half.
4. Add an extra parchment paper and spoon one half of the batter into it. Keep the edges up and try to cover half of the pan of it along the longer side. Do the same for the other half of the batter so that you have both batters covering the pan but the papers are keeping them divided.
5. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until the cake has risen and is lightly brown on the edges and has a dull finish on top. Take both halves out of the pan and let cool.
6. Trim the edges of the cake so that both pieces are the same size. Cut each half in two so that you have four equally sized strips.
7. Gently heat the apricot jam in a small pan and stick the stripes of cake together, one plain piece next to one coloured one, and then vice versa to make a checkerboard effect.
8. Roll out the almond paste into a rectangle the length of the cake and wide enough to cover both sides.  Brush the top of the assembled cake with apricot jam and then invert the cake on to the almond paste, then brush the remaining three sides with apricot jam. Press the almond paste neatly around the cake. Put in the fridge for a while so that the jam cools down.
9. Serve in inch sized slices.