Union Jack Battenberg Cake

This weekend, in honour of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, Joel and I are attending a barbecue with his lab, where I will be bringing one of my most ambitious cake creations yet.

A Union Jack battenberg.

 This first photo is the BBC food version.  Fine, yes, but I thought the red stripes were a little lacking.  They don't quite have the same punch made of jam as they are in this cake as they would if made of, say, cake.

I was actually inspired partly by this cake, or one like it:

As well as by a conversation with a co-worker about what I could make for this barbecue / Diamond Jubilee party.  She suggested a battenberg as a traditional English cake, and somehow we thought up the idea of doing one in the shape of a Union Jack.  I suppose I love the idea of having a "message" hidden on the inside of a cake, so when you slice into it you get a surprise, and what better time to make a flag cake than for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee?

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Union Jack, This is what it looks like:

 I thought any good representation of this flag would look quite pathetic without a good, strong red cross (that strength being what the BBC version is missing).  As an Englishman, Joel agrees.  The main red cross is that of St. George and represents England on the Union flag.

For those of you who aren't familiar with a battenberg, this is what a normal one looks like:

Typically, those squares of cake are almond and vanilla flavoured, held together with apricot jam, and the entire thing held together with marzipan.

So, bearing these things in mind, I set to work.

First off, I needed a blue cake and a red cake.  I used the typical British cake recipe, what Americans would call a "pound cake", or a 1:1:1 ratio, by weight, of flour, sugar, and butter, plus a couple of eggs, a little bit of milk, and whatever flavouring was wanted.  I did the blue in French Almond and the red in Vanilla.

Easy enough.  It took a whole tube of gel food colouring each to get the colours so strong, plus some regular liquid food colouring.  The blue cake has just a touch of red colouring in, and the red has a few drops of yellow gel food colouring (Dr. Oetker's, if you're wondering).

When they were cool, I trimmed and shaped the cakes appropriately.

As you can see, I needed four quarters of blue, then sliced diagonally, and three thin sheets of red.

The cake was filled with buttercream icing, most of it white but between 1/4 and 1/3 coloured red for the diagonal red stripes.

On each of those little squares of blue cake that had been cut diagonally, one side was covered with a thin layer of white icing, the other with red, then they were put together (refer to the two pieces on the right).

To the left in the above picture, you can see the wedge of red cake put upright between two of the reassembled quarters of blue.

I did actually attempt to do diagonal stripes of jam, but I found it far too difficult.  The pieces simply wouldn't stay together.  Shaped as they are, as wedges, they slide everywhere when you try to put things together.  Therefore, at Joel's suggestion, I then coloured part of the buttercream red and used that instead.

Next you frost the TOP of the BOTTOM HALF of your flag and put a layer of red cake on top.  Frost the top of that again, then place the top half of the cake on, like so:

At this point, after checking and re-checking that the cake was properly square and that nothing was sliding anywhere, it went in the fridge for a couple of hours to get nicely solid.

At the end of the chilling time, the cake was quite solid and easy enough to work with.  I rolled out a thin layer of ready-roll marzipan, frosted the outside of the cake (one side at a time!) with the remainder of the buttercream, and pressed the marzipan around the sides.

Now comes the time when any baker is looking at what they've made and hoping, just hoping, that it looks as good as they imagined.

I must tell you, when I cut off the 1/4 inch from each end to reveal the inner pattern, I about died.

Beautiful.

Not quite as clean as I would have liked it, I wasn't as careful as I should have been about the cutting and some of the cooling times, but I'm extremely pleased with it anyway.  It certainly looks more like I wanted it to look like than some of the other Union Jack cakes I've seen online.  ESPECIALLY the colours.  I'm very proud of those colours.

Here's me looking proud of my cake.  Not only does it look nice, it's very tasty.  Almond and vanilla are sure winners in my book.  Next time, though, I would love to try strawberry and blueberry or something...that would be more fitting for those colours.

So to the lovely Queen Elizabeth II: Happy anniversary of your coronation, long may you reign!




P.S. Maybe you've noticed we're obsessed with the Union Jack a little bit?  See the potholder in the background of the photo?  And it's only a fluke that I'm not wearing our Union Jack apron...