I attempted The Great British Bake Off's battenberg cake technical challenge – here's how it went


Watching this week’s episode of The Great British Bake Off I was thrilled to realise that the technical challenge was introducing a new concept.
Baking after just a taste test and with no recipe? The only result would be brilliant television. Upping the difficulty on the challenge after last year’s Bake Off felt like a good step forward to keep things fresh.
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Hide AdBut I did wonder… how hard was it to pull off a technical challenge anyway?
I soon discovered that the answer is very hard, after making eight of my own mini battenberg cakes.
Now, I didn’t do it without a recipe; there’s about two things I could bake without a recipe and neither of them are battenberg cake. Not to mention, Paul Hollywood’s recipe on The Great British Bake Off website literally says right there that it “needs skill” - something I don’t really have.
I can bake decently well, provided that I have a recipe and you don’t mind things looking a bit “rustic”. But I certainly do not have the skills required to make something like a battenberg cake – let alone eight mini ones.
But what I do have is the audacity.
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Hide AdSo here’s what happened when I attempted to make the Bake Off battenberg cakes.
Before I could make the battenberg, I had to buy some ingredients
Unfortunately the first step to making these cakes was spending money. My closest big supermarket that would have all of the ingredients and equipment I needed is around a forty minute walk away, so after work on Wednesday I stuffed my backpack with additional bags and made the trek to the shop.
I had some of the pantry staple ingredients I needed such as icing sugar, caster sugar and eggs, but I had just finished my last bag of self-raising flour and was at the bottom of my regular sugar, all of which meant I was in for an expensive (and heavy) shopping trip.


On top of that I had to buy a food thermometer which isn’t something I already owned.
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Hide AdOne thing I did note was that the recipe called for a food processor - though not in the equipment section which put Mr Hollywood very firmly in my bad books - which I don’t have and I wasn’t willing to buy one for the sake of this challenge. Instead I decided to use a blender and hope for the best.
I fell at the first curdle – sorry, hurdle
The first thing the recipe calls for is to prepare the baking tin, with a foil divider down the middle. The recipe technically calls for special two-in-one baking paper and foil but I couldn’t find it and, quite frankly, I didn’t want to buy it even if I did.
Instead I used the tinfoil to create the structure, then lined it with parchment paper. All went fine, except I was a bit laissez-faire with my measurements and I probably should have been more precise. (If I was actually on Bake Off I dread to think what audiences would think of me.)
Now in two halves, it was time to make the cake.
I had (wrongly) assumed that this process would go smoothly considering I don’t typically struggle while making cakes. For the most part this remained true; creaming together the butter and sugar went well, then it was a case of adding the eggs in, one at a time.
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Hide AdThe recipe did warn that you could add a tablespoon of flour to the mixture at this point, in case of curdling.
However, I didn’t really pay this any attention and I’m sure you don’t need to guess what happened next - my eggs curdled in the mixture.


First of all, I have made plenty of cakes in my life and I had no idea that this could happen. But in the true spirit of The Great British Bake Off I decided just to plough on and attempted to fix my cake with flour.
Now if I had decided to read up on this, maybe my end result wouldn’t have been quite as wonky.
Alas. I didn’t though.
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Hide AdFor the most part my batter was okay after sorting out the curdling with a small amount of flour. Once that was handled I folded in the remaining flour, then split the batter in two before mixing the food colouring in.


Here I ran into another issue – though it wouldn’t become evident until the cakes were out of the oven – I didn’t add enough food colouring.
In my defence, I’ve never used food colouring before, so I didn’t really know what to expect. The pink looked like the last strawberry ice cream I had to me but it didn’t really work out which is a big shame.
Once I had made sure my wonky oven was mostly at the correct temperature, and with the batter now in the pan, they went into the oven.
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Hide AdAround 25 minutes later I pulled it out… only to discover that they were both the same colour. But that was okay because I was still enjoying myself at this point; I like making cakes and I learned something new which should help me going forward.


Making jam was simpler than I thought
This part I was pretty excited about. I’ve never made jam before and I was pretty keen to try it.
I thought this part would go horribly wrong but it was probably the smoothest part of the process. I chopped up the apricots before adding them and the jam sugar into a pan. It was then a case of dissolving the sugar over a low heat and boiling until it reached 105°C.
I had to transfer the jam into a heatproof bowl and, stupidly, instead of using just a normal bowl I used my Pyrex measuring jug with its rim which is far smaller than my sieve. Regardless, it turned out fine.
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My one complaint here is that I wish the instructions were a bit more descriptive. I think my jam turned out fine, but I’ve never made it before and there was no real description of what it should look like throughout so that’s still just me guessing.
I then sat it to the side to cool and moved onto the next thing: buttercream. I’ve made buttercream plenty in the past, though usually with more ingredients.
The Bake Off battenberg recipe only calls for unsalted butter and icing sugar so that’s what I did, mixing them together until pale, smooth and fluffy. I then sat this to the side until ready to use.
The Great British Bake Off’s mini battenberg cakes have made marzipan my enemy for life
I mentioned this earlier, but the only equipment The Great British Bake Off mini battenberg cake recipe calls for is a cooking thermometer. Apparently a food processor isn’t special equipment.
Who knew?
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Hide AdAnyway, I wasn’t going to buy one for this – especially not since I have a blender and that’s basically the same thing. Or so I thought. This was just the beginning of my marzipan misery.
I had to split the mixture into two separate blender containers, something I realised when I had already tried to blend the first half of the mixture. From there, it was following the instructions as much as possible.
The directions for this section cover just one paragraph which, distilled, equals: blend ground almonds, icing sugar and caster sugar together, add egg white and almond extract and pulse into a paste, then knead in yellow food colouring.


In later steps you then roll out the marzipan – mine kept sticking together – and cut it into rectangles to cover the assembled battenberg cakes – during which my marzipan cracked – after spreading it with the apricot jam.
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Hide AdHonestly, I could write a whole essay on my issues with making marzipan but I won’t.
Just know that it was at this point that I stopped having fun learning new things and instead imagined storming out of the Bake Off tent in a fit of hysterics after overcompensating and using too much yellow food colouring.
I also have a weird carton of egg whites in the fridge and I need to figure out what to do with them now.
To cut a long story short, life is too short to make your own marzipan. Just buy it. Even Mary Berry’s coffee and walnut Battenburg cake recipe calls simply for “white marzipan”.
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Hide AdAssembling the my less-than-symmetrical battenberg cakes
If I were to do this again, there’s a lot I would do differently, buying marzipan aside.
I would research the cake curdling thing and try and figure out how to get a flat top. I would actually make sure to cut things evenly. When the recipe says trim the edges, I wouldn’t snack on the scraps of cake so I actually want to eat the finished product.
In my defence, I think if I had added enough food colouring and made this with the intention of creating one big Battenberg cake it probably would have been okay. (But if wishes were horses…)


I originally misread the instructions and had to go back and salvage my buttercream distribution which meant my cross sections were unfortunately messy on top of lacking the signature pink colour of battenberg.
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Hide AdIt was when I was rolling out the marzipan to slice into rectangles that I could practically feel the last thread of my tenuous will to live fraying, getting closer and closer every time it stuck to my rolling pin.
But I was almost done and all I needed to do was assemble them; so that’s what I did (even if it took far longer than I had expected).


I do not know how those bakers managed as well as they did in the tent under that kind of time pressure and without a recipe. I spent a long time – even with breaks – prepping, baking, doing dishes (seriously, so many dishes) and assembling - so much so that I’m not sure how many hours it ended up taking me in total.
I already had respect for bakers who put themselves under that kind of pressure in the tent, but I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to watch a technical challenge in the same way.
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Hide AdHow did my attempt at Bake Off’s battenberg technical taste?
Looks aside, how did my eight (less than identical) battenberg cakes taste?
Good! They actually taste like battenberg cake; even though they don’t really resemble it.


My attempt at making them was just that – an attempt. I prefer cooking over baking, but I learned a lot doing this -hence why they call it a technical challenge.
While I’ll probably never make my own marzipan again, I would like to try redeeming myself even if it’s just in appearance.
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