So I've been on Amazon and bought myself a little pressie - Rachel Allen's Cake, and gave her Battenburg recipe a go. It surprised me in that the cake itself was just a basic Victoria sponge recipe; it was the method that was the tricky part. I had to separate the batter into two batches so one could be coloured pink (harder than it sounds - I had to try and stir the colour in thoroughly without knocking all the air out of the mixture.)
The batter then had to be put into a square 20cm cake tin which had a folded parchment separator in the middle to give it two compartments and therefore produce two rectangular cakes, one of each colour. Trying to get the first lot of batter in without the paper collapsing was the tricky bit! Once the second lot was in, each side kind of held it up so the only trouble was making sure it stayed in the middle.
Whilst baking, the paper did seem to drift off to one side, so I ended up with one wide short cake and one narrow tall cake! But with a bit of trimming, I was able to fix this.
Half a jar of apricot jam and far too much marzipan later, this was the result:
Not bad for a first attempt, I like to think!
