BATTENBERG BEAUTY

This month on the Daring Kitchen, baker's were challenged to make Battenberg Cakes in honor of Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee...since I'm a granddaughter of British Isle immigrants, I thought it was appropriate! There are sort of a pound cake, baked in either a special pan or with divisions in a larger pan to make at least four separate strips of cake.  Then those strips are held together with something like jelly or strained jam.  After they're together, fondant/marzipan/chocolate plastique covers it.  Here's my version:

Triple Threat Battenberg Cake

Mixing Chocolate Plastique--very easily came together!

Takes a bit to get it warmed up enough to roll out.  Next time would use  chocolate powder as it ended up with  white  on the outside.  Some people had shiny plastique but don't know how they did it

Pampered Chef Casserole dish prepared to hold three different batters.  Made tinfoil divisions, then covered them and bottom of pan with buttered parchment paper.

Used the spatula to measure strips and cut with sharp serrated knife

Made green mint, yellow orange, and chocolate cake by dividing batter into three bowls and then colored and  flavored them

Cakes out of pan and trimmed

Cake strips "glued" together and covered with applebutter.  Next time I'd use the recommended apricot or something less spicy, and would frost with buttercream before covering with plastique.  Hubby would have much preferred buttercream for the "glue" and covering!

Batter before dividing--nice batter

Pulverized a whole orange to put in cake batter after taking out seeds

Rice flour I made in my Magic Mill from white rice kernals

Someone even made a rubik's cube (look it up online) and lots of Daring Kitchen baker's made just beautiful decorations for their cakes.  One think that was a problem was cutting the plastique--it tended to crack.  Oh, and DO NOT chill your ready to be covered cake or plastique cracks very easily--yep, I know about this from experience!  Three of my girlie girls loved this when they came to visit gramma last week...sometime we're going to make it when we're not so busy decorating sugar cookies, learning to do crewel embroidery and just generally having fun, fun, fun!!!


Hope you'll go here: http://www.joyofbaking.com/ModelingChoc.html for the chocolate plastique, or if want to make your own fondant, look up marshmallow fondant--easy and tasty.  for the cake, try this site for one using pound cake mix, or use a good pound cake recipe: http://www.bhg.com/recipe/layer-cakes/battenberg-cake/

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.


If you look up poundcake in my labels, you'll find my absolutely favorite and fabulous recipe from a cookbook I got in Germany in 70's.  Posted January this year.