Yearly Archives: 2010

Battenburg Revival

I might horrify you here. I scared myself a little – I had an important mission to undertake: I was asked to make a Battenburg cake last week. My memories of these are of pink and white sawdust cake, eaten to be polite, the cake that could not be refused. But we found two packets of old marzipan left over from Christmas in the garage and Brian suggested this, adding the killer line,

My Gran used to make this for me, and it’s my favourite.

Lego cake

…. here is my first attempt – tasteful, natural colouring, extremely fashionable looking isn’t it? Note lack of pinpoint precision and razor sharp lines too :) Because I can’t resist looking these things up this is what Wiki has to say

The origin of the name is not clear, but one theory claims that the cake was created in honour of the marriage in 1884 of Queen Victoria‘s granddaughter to Prince Louis of Battenberg, with the four squares representing the four Battenberg princes: Louis, Alexander, Henry and Francis Joseph.

OK, probably a bit heavy on the pink stuff, but the sponge worked beautifully
and I used these two Matfer tins that I had, one of which I got for a song in Cheltenham the other week. 25 cm long x 7 wide approx (the tin doesn’t need to be very deep) more like a couple of inches so you could use any two shallow tins. I got lucky this time.

So now what I want to do is make a brown and green one, that red food colouring is just a bit much. Though if you close your eyes and eat the cake it is actually melty delicious, soft light sponge, and sweet with apricots and marzipan and home made is definitely better than anything you can buy. Assembling the thing has a certain lego like quality of silliness that made me feel very happy. Who can be sad looking at a cake like that?

But to my reason for writing this post – can anyone suggest how to make

this sponge mix into chocolate and pistachio ????

175 g self raising flour
175 g caster sugar
175 g butter
3 eggs
and of course red food colouring (only use a couple of drops, not like me who used a teaspoonful!)

for the two sponges

You also need

small jar of apricot or raspberry jam
old packet of leftover marzipan from Christmas

Cream soft unsalted butter and sugar till really really white and fluffy
Add eggs one at at time
Fold in the flour gently.

Nothing complicated until you have to decide how much food colouring, don’t use as much as I did (!) and how to divide the batter between the two lightly greased tins.

I cooked these at 170 C in an ordinary oven for 27 minutes, might take less or more depending on your oven. Felt soft and delicate when I pressed with finger but the skewer came out clean so took them out.

Leave to sit in tin for a couple of minutes then turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool completely before cutting each sponge in half into 2 square profiled logs with a serrated knife.

You can cut away till you get them more or less the same and eat the bits as you go along.

Assemble the cake from your four logs, white on pink, using warmed jam as the mortar on the inside surfaces, don’t put jam on the outside at this point. The logs don’t have to be perfect, the cake is quite forgiving as you assemble it.

When putting the marzipan on, you need to roll it out quite thinly to about 1/4 inch deep. You need to do a bit of measuring to make sure you have a piece that will wrap all the way round the cake. Then you brush some warmed jam on the top of the cake Pick the cake up and place it jam side down on the marzipan sheet.

Then cover the sides and the top with a layer of jam and gently bring the marzipan up round the sides, pressing and smoothing as you go and across the top.

Trim off the ends with a sharp knife and turn upside down again so the seam is on the bottom of the cake.

It’s a good idea to chill the whole thing in the fridge for an hour to help it firm up once you have put the marzipan on.

So…
what sort of chocolate/cocoa would I need to add and how much ?

ditto if I chopped up pistachios and toasted them a bit, how much would I need to add?

And if anyone wants to have a go at it and show me how it should be done, that would be great! If you send me a picture, (or if you blog, a link to your post that would be fun too) – and I’ll add them on to this post if you want me to.

Oh, and was it like his Gran’s? I have no idea, he’s eaten most of it, so lets hope so :)

To see Lynne’s and be inspired to have a go click here. Do send me a picture if you feel like sharing it here. Email zebbakes at gmail.com

Edit: Since I wrote this post I have had a go at a chocolate version using Suelle’s suggestions of adding 1 tbsp of cocoa and 50 g of melted chocolate to one half of the mixture and 50 grams of ground pistachios and a smidgen of green food colour to the other half. Here’s a picture: I really like the chocolate marzipan which was 2 tbsps cocoa worked into a packet of white marzipan….

The chocolate/pistachio version with chocolate marzipan

Yoghurt Making (2)

An example of homemade yoghurt

This is just a quick post for those people who seem to end up here looking for info about yoghurt making. The best results I have had so far using the Lakeland electric yoghurt maker which I have been using for about eight weeks is from the following method. Quick to set up, no saucepans of cooling forgotten milk.

2 teaspoons of fresh live yoghurt – do not be tempted to use more, it will not make the yoghurt ‘happen’ faster or better!
2 dessertspoons of non fat skimmed dried milk, something I have never bought before but the yoghurt seems to like it, what more can I say?
1 litre of UHT milk. Ideally full fat. Morrissons 4 per cent fat performs better than Waitrose 3.6 per cent fat.

Using UHT milk means you skip all that heating it up to a certain temperature and then waiting for it to cool down again, less washing up, so offsetting the carbon footprint of using an electric yoghurt maker, also if you make your own you are reducing your packaging use. Not sure if there is a net gain or loss but I am trying hard here.

Put the 2 tsps of yoghurt in the bottom of the container. Sprinkle the non fat powder on top. Add a little UHT milk. Give it a good stir around. Put container in the electric heater bit. Add the rest of the milk. Put the lid on. And then leave for at least 8 hours, mine seems to take more like 9 hours to go. It’s odd stuff. You look at it and nothing happens for ages and then it goes all of a sudden.

If you don’t have a yoghurt maker then use a wide necked flask or a jug, but you will have to consider how you will keep it warm. A good thermos flask will probably work fine. Yoghurt needs a warm temperature to develop. The lactobacteria and the Streptococcus thermophilus – the organisms that create the yoghurt – are called ‘thermophilic’ (lovers of heat) for that reason. It needs to be kept at 100-degrees Fahrenheit (37-degrees Celsius). It will get more sour the longer it is kept warm, so that is why you chill yoghurt in the fridge once it has developed to the thickness and taste you want. It is worth doing more research on the net if you want to know more about this.

Take it out of the electric heater bit. Let it cool a while. I put mine in the fridge overnight and then put it into clean pyrex containers with snap on lids like these.

You can use the easi yo stuff in it. I have found that it splits. But when it does split, it’s easy enough to strain it through a bit of muslin in a sieve and then you have wonderful whey for baking bread, can’t recommend this too highly, and a thick soft yoghurt that you can use in lots of ways.

Today I made rocket pesto using fresh yoghurt

My sister's recipe for pesto

I used:-

A big bunch of going over rocket from the garden
Fresh garlic
Grated pecorino cheese
Cashew nuts
Yoghurt
A little walnut oil and extra virgin olive oil
Salt

I can’t give you exact quantities because I basically shoved the lot in the blender and mixed and tasted till I got something I liked. You can use any favourite herbs and nuts: this is my sister’s way of making pesto, as she prefers yoghurt to loads of oil, makes it much lighter. I store it in the fridge with a layer of olive oil on the top which reduces the effect of oxidisation.

Pesto in fridge with layer of olive oil on top in recycled container

Spread it on sourdough toast for a quick sandwich, add to pasta, mix into salad dressings…

July 2010 – Made a lovely lime cheesecake with strained yoghurt (labneh) made from rich creamy Jersey/Guernsey milk. Click here to read the post and the recipe.

Harlequin Ladybirds

Anyone good at identifying ladybirds?

I’ve sent this photo off to the Harlequin survey site, hoping they’ll identify it for us.

We have a dramatic influx of ladybirds on the cardoons. They are very busy, setting up home, reproducing, laying eggs, eating, generally marching about, arguing with the aphids and rarely stay still long enough for the man with the macro lens to get a clear shot let alone measure them! We think they could be Harlequins but only read up about ladybirds and their lifecycle yesterday. We are watching out for the larvae to hatch now….

They arrived in Britain in 2004 and are marching westwards, no ordinary ladybird, bigger and meaner than our native species. I usually pay more attention to birds, like the collared doves who are so successful here, and the rose-ringed parrakeets and the little egrets who now inhabit parks and wetlands respectively. But not usually my garden! The world is in flux constantly and the insect world is no exception….

So the question is, should I be grateful that in three days time their larvae will hatch and proceed to devour all aphids, butterfly eggs and everything else that stands in their path, or should I remove their eggs from the leaves and use dilute soap to wash away the aphids?

It’s National Insect Week next week apparently, so I’d love to hear what’s crawling and buzzing around where you live!

Here are two more of Brian’s wonderful pics…any experts out there want to have a go at identifying them for us? (Contact details for him here if you want to use one of his images)