Okay, I honestly swear on my trusty Kenwood mixer that you CAN do this. All it takes is a little bit of effort and splash of pink and yellow and voila! A caramelised geometric sponge your granny would be proud of! Must be served with tea, in a teapot, with a tea cosy. Must.

Ingredients

• 300g golden caster sugar
• 300g salted butter
• 300g self raising flour
• 6 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla essence
• a few drops of pink and yellow food colouring
• 1 pack of golden marzipan
• 6 tbsp apricot jam

Preheat your oven to 170C for a fan and 180C for a gas. Then in a mixing bowl cream together your butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add your eggs one by one with the vanilla essence. Sift in your flour and give it all a good mix until all incorporated. Now divide your mixture into two and colour one half with the yellow food colouring and the other with the pink food colouring. Line a rectangular tin with greaseproof paper and with a folded piece of foil, make a divide down the middle so the two mixtures don’t touch. Spoon the batters into the designated sides of the tin, smooth down the tops and bake for about 15-20 mins or until the spring back when prodded. When they are ready, leave to cool completely. When cool, level of the top with a bread knife if needs be, the batons must be completely equal all way round for the Battenberg to be perfect. When you’ve trimmed the tops, slice the sponges into roughly 1’’ thick strips. They need to be the same width as the depth, which ought to be about an inch. Next, in a saucepan, get your jam with about 100ml water on a medium heat to melt. You need to be able to paint to jam onto the sponge and marzipan with a brush, so the consistency needs to be quite runny. While thats melting, rub icing sugar over a clean surface and roll out the marzipan into a rectangle, the same length widthways as your batons, leaving plenty of room to roll around the sponge, mine was roughly 12’’ by 15’’. When your jam is ready, paint it over your rolled marzipan. Place one baton right at the top(the edge trimmed with a knife so it’s perfectly straight) and paint the inner edge with jam. Choose the other colour sponge and place tightly next to the first. Paint all the exposed sides with jam and place two more batons on top of the two existing, making sure to switch the colour in a chequer-board way. Paint the outer edges with jam and very carefully and tightly begin to roll the whole sponge towards yourself, covering all the sides with marzipan. When you get to the end, neatly trim off any excess marzipan, leave the sides loose, you’ll want those on for a neat finish. If you have a blowtorch, give the whole Battenberg a quick torch for a really tasty caramel finish. Then trim off your ends, eat them, and show everyone what you’ve made! Queen Victoria would be seriously amused right now.