Pimp My Cake

[visiongallery set=72157629218356097]

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills” said President Kennedy of the great race to lunar success. A few days ago we completed the baking equivalent of landing on the moon. The task wasn’t easy. It was hard. It measured the best of our energies and skills. What, you may ask, did we achieve?

Ladies and gentleman, we baked a 60 centimetre by 60 centimetre cross-section of a Battenberg Cake!

We can already sense your next question – the inevitable “Why?” Ever heard of the website Pimp That Snack? The sole aim of the website and its contributors is to make any normal sweet snack, but enlarge it by a humongous degree. Log on and you will see a range of mammoth wonders. You will be witness to a half-foot high Creme Egg, a Party Ring biscuit measuring about twice the size of your head and a Crunchie longer than your arm. It got us wondering – what snack could we recreate that would be larger than a suitable body part.

A few days later and we were planning a Battenberg bigger than your imagination, and some of your body parts…

Ingredients

The first challenge was bringing all the ingredients together. In the end we estimated 200g of self-raising flour, 200g of sugar, 200g of butter, four eggs, a teaspoon of baking powder, two tablespoons of milk and pink or yellow food colouring for each quarter of the cake. For the assembly we then needed a whole jar of jam and two packets of marzipan. That was well over a kilogram of ingredients and a hell of a lot of work ahead before us.

Measuring

We began measuring out all the ingredients for the first yellow quarter of the cake. As the mist of flour rose, the butter slid over our fingers and the egg shells piled up we started to realise that maybe we had bitten off more than we could chew.

Beating

As our recipe for a much smaller Victoria sponge cake instructed we piled all the ingredients together and started beating them together. My £10 Tesco home brand electric beaters started wheezing like a fat man chasing an ice cream van. It was almost like they weren’t designed to beat together ridiculously industrial sizes of cake batter…

Food Colouring (one)

Now we had to add the all important food colouring that would make our Battenberg quarter so beautifully yellow. Opening the little pot of yellow food colouring we found a lump of red gel. As we tried to add it to the cake mixture we discovered that not only did it look like blood, but it had the consistency of gluey cement mixture. We started to worry again.

Baking

But there was no need to worry. A couple of minutes later the red gluey cement gel had been beaten away into a decidedly orange cake mixture. We poured it into our 12 inch square baking tray and bunged it in the oven.

Taking Out

25 minutes later and our labours had paid off as we grabbed our first quarter of Battenberg Cake out of the oven and found a perfectly baked extra large square of self-raising fun. Imagine, if you will, it like being a child who had been given a six foot Dairy Milk chocolate bar and you will understand how we were feeling.

Repeat Baking

And now begin the whole process again. An extra large, mammoth, humongous, bodybuilder Battenberg cake is not a recipe to be attempted by the lazy. We needed to make at least another yellow slice and two pink slices.

Food Colour (Two)

Probably the most disturbing part of the whole process was making a pink cake mix. This must be what the insides of Katie Price’s skull looks like – girly and non-sensical.

“Assembly”

A couple of hour later we had our four quarters baked. We started placing them together, covering our fingers in warmed jam and sticking reams of marzipan on to the sides of our big baked Battenberg. By the end of it all our kitchen looked like the scene of Agatha Christie’s ‘Murder in the Bakery’ (I may have made that book up). But we had made, what was possibly, the world’s largest Battenberg cake. There was an odd sense of achievement, a joyous pride and a parental care towards our silly snack. If only our degrees were in oversized baked goods.