Anyone who knows me, knows I love to bake. One of my favorite sayings is “When the world says no, the kitchen says YES!” On days when I feel unclear, unmotivated, or defeated, I move into the kitchen and make some magic. It’s my therapy. I work out my problems and at the end of it I have something yummy to eat or share with others. (The Omaha Fashion Week and Omaha Design Center teams have had many treats from my kitchen foisted upon them!)
*These photos were taken by me. I hope Kori (@irokthekitchen) will take some of her own to share!
This week I made a day-date with my friend (and Charlotte’s nanny), Kori, to take on a challenge I’ve been dreaming about for years. Kori shares my love of baking - for different reasons. Her passion is food photography and her work has been featured in national publications and websites. Because of this passion of hers, she often takes on technical challenges in the kitchen so she can capture the end result on camera. Check her out at on @irokthekitchen!
We teamed up to make a traditional British Christmas treat, Battenberg Cake. I first had this beautiful cake while visiting Nick’s family in England over Christmas in 2011. Nick’s dad Graham, like me, had a sweet tooth and took great joy in introducing me to many of the dessert delicacies that are Christmas traditions in the UK. We tried plum pudding, Christmas cake, Christmas jelly, fruit cake…all of which were…gross! I politely choked them down with a healthy dose of pouring cream every night after dinner. Then one night, he brought out the Battenberg cake. I had never seen anything like it. It was wrapped in a white frosting I’d never tasted, which I soon found out was marzipan. He cut into it and revealed a lovely sponge cake in a checkerboard pattern of pink and yellow. It was delicious! No cream needed for this cake.
The story behind Battenberg cake goes back to when Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Victoria, married Prince Louis of Battenberg. This cake was eaten at their wedding and soared in popularity at that time. Today, the checkerboard pattern from this cake lives on, as it is featured on British emergency vehicles where they are known as Battenberg markings.
We tried this recipe from the BBC. The sponge cake was very easy to put together…it was literally a dump cake. No need to cream the butter and sugar together first in this recipe! The cakes turned out pretty well, although they fell a bit in the center. Because this recipe originated in the UK, we had to convert all measurements and temperature from metric to ‘Merican. We might have to adjust our conversions or bake time to prevent the sponge from falling in the future.
While the cakes were baking, we made the marzipan. The cake recipe called for 1,000 grams of the stuff! You can’t buy that amount commercially anywhere in Omaha so we had to make it ourselves. The recipe was fairly straight forward. First we made almond paste, which is equal parts almond flour and powdered sugar with a bit of egg white to bind it together. After the paste was made, we added three more cups of powdered sugar and the whites of three more eggs + a little almond extract to pump up the almond flavor. The mixture got so thick that it burned out the motor on my food processor! We moved to the stand mixer to finish the marzipan. We may have added too much egg white because the mixture was pretty loose and sticky. We thickened it with a bit more almond flour to get the right consistency. It eventually became like sugar cookie dough and required a bit of kneading.
Next was cake assembly, which I thought would be so easy! Wrong. Took me all afternoon. Because the sponge cake fell a bit in the middle, I had to work a little harder to get strips of cake that were the same width and height. I used a sharp bread knife to delicately cut away the uneven parts and ended up with eight fairly even 1x1 strips of yellow and pink sponge cake. Then it was time to roll out the marzipan. I dusted the countertop with powdered sugar and got to work. Once rolled out, I melted down apricot preserves and ran them through a sieve to get a smooth, clear jelly that I would use to glue the cake together and bind to the marzipan. I can’t even begin to explain how I wrapped the cakes in the marzipan. It was sort of like wrapping a present…one of those things I think I’ll get better at with more practice.
Then end result was really pretty! And tasty. Charlotte is napping now, and said she was going to dream of eating this cake when she woke. I can’t wait to share it with her! I also managed to solve an accounting problem while I was baking. So this was a win-win-win!