← Nouns Cooking · Bakery

Ingredients

• 175 g Butter, very soft
• 175 g caster (superfine) sugar
• 3 medium eggs
• 140 g Self-raising flour
• 50 g Ground almonds
• ½ tsp Baking powder
• ½ tsp Vanilla extract
• ¼ tsp Almond extract
• ½ tsp pink or red food colouring gel
• 150 g apricot jam
• 400 g white marzipan
• 1 tbsp icing sugar, for dusting

Method

1. Heat the oven to 180°C (160°C fan, 350°F). Grease a 20 cm square tin, line it with baking paper and make a divider down the middle with a pleat of foil-lined paper, so you have two 10 x 20 cm halves.
2. Beat the butter, sugar, eggs, flour, ground almonds, baking powder, vanilla and almond extract together for 2 min until smooth and creamy.
3. Spoon half the batter into one side of the tin. Stir the food colouring into the rest until evenly pink and spoon it into the other side. Level both.
4. Bake for 25–30 min, until risen and a skewer comes out clean. Cool for 10 min in the tin, then on a rack until completely cold.
5. Trim the crusty edges off both sponges so they are the same height, then cut each one in half lengthways to give four equal strips. Warm the jam and push it through a sieve.
6. Brush the strips with jam and stick them together in a checkerboard: one pink and one yellow below, one yellow and one pink on top.
7. Dust the worktop with icing sugar and roll the marzipan into a rectangle long enough to wrap the cake and as wide as its length. Brush with jam, set the cake on it and wrap it up, pressing the seam underneath. Crimp the top edges, trim the ends and chill for 30 min before slicing.

Tips

• Contains almonds in the sponge and the marzipan.
• A ruler really helps when trimming the strips: the neater they are, the sharper the checkerboard.

Sources

Written in our own words after cross-checking these recipes:

BBC Good Food Great British Chefs