Great British Baking

It has been rather a long time since I updated this blog, due to the shock of being back at school with a full class of just-turned-four-year-olds and forgetting how tiring it can be! I had a busy weekend, visiting Goldhawk Road on Saturday for some retail therapy before heading home for some sewing and baking.

The sewing was a birthday present, drafting a pattern for a useful something. No pictures yet because I have a feeling I might be making some for little Christmas presents…

The baking was inspired by watching The Great British Bake Off – a Battenberg!

Battenberg!

For speed/lack of suitable tins I decided to cook both cake mixes in the same tin, using a mechanism made from cardboard and greaseproof paper to divide the tin into two.

Lining and dividing the tin

Then I added the mixture – a regular sponge mix, half flavoured with lemon juice and rind and half flavoured with orange (plus some food colouring to make sure I got the checkerboard effect) with lemon and orange drizzles ready for when they came out of the oven.

Lemon and orange cake mix

The mixtures didn’t rise evenly so when they came out of the oven there was quite a bit of levelling out to do. I cut each cake into two pieces and sandwiched them together with a lot of lemon curd, before wrapping them with sugarpaste icing and decorating with sprinkles.

Battenberg!

So, would it get the thumbs up from Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry?

Well, I think it looked pretty! I normally don’t eat Batternberg, but this one had no horrible marzipan, just yummy icing.

• Orange and lemon cakes always go down well.
• Lashings of lemon curd

And the main thing that wasn’t so great – the cake was too moist! This is not normally a problem with cake, but I think the Batternberg really needed a bit more strength to hold its shape, and the yummy drizzle was a bit too squidgy. Since I made the cake the day before the party, overnight the heaps of lemon curd soaked into the sponge overnight, creating a gooey, lemony desert – again, not a problem, but when you have layers of cake standing on top of each other, you need something a bit more substantial holding the pieces together (a solid buttercream to act as the cement?)

I will definitely make another Batternberg, but I think I’ll probably just use a basic sponge (chocolate and vanilla, or vanilla with colourings perhaps) and work a bit harder to make sure the pieces of cake have good right angles before balancing them together.

I wonder what inspiration tomorrow’s show will provide?

p.s. I have been doing my Self-Stitched-September challenge but I am lacking the photographic evidence, although I will try to do some sort of montage to show all my handmade creations (and the September additions to the wardrobe) at the end of the month.

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