Battenberg Recipe (highly recommended!

My all time favourite cake has to be the batternberg cake - it's delicious! To kick off this recipe, I'll give you a little history of the battenberg cake:
The battenberg cake was first created in honour of the marriage in 1884 between Queen Victoria's granddaughter to Prince Louis of Battenberg - each of the 4 squares represents the four Princes!

See? It's not just delicious, it's also a blast of culture and history! Anyway, onto the recipe

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INGREDIENTS:

150g caster sugar

150g  butter

1 vanilla pod

3 eggs

150g self raising flour

30ml milk

75g apricot jam

200g pre-rolled marzipan

pink food colouring

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METHOD (difficulty: moderate)

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F
Beat the sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla seeds, flour and milk together until smooth. Pour half of the cake mixture into another bowl. Add a drop of pink food colouring to one of the bowls and stir.
Grease a 15cm/6in square cake tin with a thick layer of aluminium foil down the middle to divide the tin into two equal parts.
Spoon the pink cake mixture into one side of the tin and the plain mixture into the other side.
Put in to the oven and bake for 30 minutes. Leave to cool.
Trim the cakes to the same size, then cut them both in half lengthways.
In a pan, heat the jam with a little water until it becomes liquid.
Place one of the pink pieces of cake onto a work surface and brush one side with jam.
Lay a yellow piece next to it on the jam side and push together.
Brush the tops of both pieces with more jam.
Cut the rolled marzipan so that it's just slightly longer than the cake. Wrap it around the cake, brushing the edges with a little jam to seal them.
Trim off the excess marzipan at the ends
Leave to chill for half an hour then TUCK IN! -----------------------------------------------------------------------

I know you'll enjoy this one. I'm not sure how common Battenberg Cake is in countries like the USA but trust me, this is well worth the effort.b