Having not made a Battenberg cake in a long time, I felt it time to re-visit this very firm favourite of mine. This time I went for the wonderful flavours of lime and ginger: two ingredients that go so well together.
For the recipe, I made my normal Battenberg recipe (Salted mocha and walnut – which can be found here) but with the following changes to incorporate the lime and the ginger:
- Omit the coffee, walnuts and white chocolate from the cake recipe to make up a plain batch of the cake mixture
- Split the cake mixture into two portions – one for the lime sponge and one for the ginger sponge (see below).
- Make a lime and ginger buttercream (see below).
- Gently knead in the finely grated zest of 1 lime to the marzipan.
- Top with a few small pieces of stem ginger.
For the lime sponge:
- Mix in 60g finely crushed pistachioes into one portion of the cake mixture.
- Mix in the finely grated zest of 4 limes
For the ginger sponge:
- Mix 30g sifted cocoa powder and 2 teaspoons of ground ginger with 40ml boiling water to give a paste. Leave to cool and stir into the second portion of cake mixture.
- Stir in 4 pieces of stem ginger, crushed almost to a pulp.
Bake as in the salted mocha and walnut Battenberg.
For the lime and ginger buttercream:
- 80g very soft unsalted butter
- 120g sifted icing sugar
- 2 tablespoons of syrup from a jar of stem ginger
- the juice of two limes
- 50g white chocolate, melted and cooled
Beat the ingredients together for the buttercream and use to stick the two sponges together, as in the salted mocha and walnut Battenberg recipe above.
TOP TIP: the white chocolate ensures the buttercream does not curdle when the liquid (ginger syrup and lime juice in this case) is added. I have always found this to be a neat trick when adding liquids suich as citrus juice, coffee or alcohol to buttercream
Phil's Home Kitchen 
You never disappoint me! I searched for Battenberg and you’ve given me many options!!!! this one is probably going to be IT! I just hope I can conquer this…. (sigh)
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