BATTENBERG CAKE WITH A TWIST

Wait a second! You can make a classic quite tricky cake even trickier to make?! YES! OH YES! (Just ask my husband, he will be more than willing to tell you how long he spent cutting out templates the day before my birthday!)

So many people have asked me why I made my own birthday cake. a) Because I love baking b) Because my husband works long hours c) Because we all wanted to eat a cake after all (hubby offered to make me one but then added that we may end up with food poisoning...)

So for three weeks before hand I was researching recipes and wondering what I should bake. I wanted a cake I haven't made before and something challenging at the same time. I was watching one of the Masterclass episodes from the GBBO on the Iplayer and saw Mary Berry explaining how to do a round Battenberg cake. She made it look so easy! So this was it! I was going to have a go at it. I was going to make a round Battenberg too! I found a recipe for
a chocolate, raspberry and rose gateau on the BBC Good Food website and went shopping. Because my cake was feeding just us 4, I opted to half all ingredients, so instead of 4 tiers my cake only had 2. The recipe calls for 3 large eggs so I used 2 small eggs for each sponge. A good friend of mine kindly let me borrow her 7'' tins and there I was, baking 2 very similar, yet completely different sponge cakes.
Of course I bought frozen raspberries instead of freeze dried so my pink sponge ended up being just a rose water one instead.

I was worried the frozen berried would make it too soggy and heavy.
Making the sponges was no problem at all - the instructions on the website were spot on. My chocolate sponge baked evenly but my pink one... well, lets just say it turned out a bit smaller than the other one.

 

It took hubby a long time to figure out how to cut them in 3 circles each. It looked beautiful at the end:)

My ganache split, obviously. I did save it. Yay! I think it was too hot so adding some cream to it help.
I had this vision in my head how this cake would have been so nice and smooth and easy to cover with the ganache. How wrong was I! But eventually around 11pm the night before my birthday my cake was ready.

The next day once we cut it the kids screamed with joy.
The chess pattern was beautiful and I have to say the cake held together pretty well. I was so proud! I honestly believed it would fall apart straight away.

It is a great show stopper cake. I don't like marzipan and have never liked a traditional Battenberg cake but I absolutely adored this one and will definitely make again. You don't have to have the chess pattern, simply sandwich both cakes together. It will still be a beautiful and delicious cake.

Do you like a classic Battenberg?

XoXo
Desi in the Kitchen