AT OUR newly opened cafe in Almondbury, we’ve now pretty much established a system, whereby the chefs downstairs, myself included, make and prepare the savoury things, whilst Tracy makes the cakes upstairs.

There’s almost always a cake or two being made fresh each day, and the pastry kitchen is always lovely and warm, with that comforting vanilla-y, sugary, bakery smell that instantly sets the senses a-twitching.

There are few smells as tempting or indeed as redolent as the smell of cakes in the oven. As Tracy has a very deft hand with the bakery side of things, she pretty much just gets on with it, and consequently I rarely get to have a crack at baking a cake for myself.

So I thought I’d use my day off wisely and knock up a real old-school tea-time classic, which I’d been reminded of the other day. Today we’re making a Battenberg.

Battenberg cake is thought to have been invented by a clever soul in the royal pastry kitchens, to mark the marriage in 1884 of Princess Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, to Prince Louis of Battenberg, whose son, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, tragically lost his life to an IRA bomb in his fishing boat in Ireland.

Researching this story sent me off on a fantastic journey through the intricacies and intrigue of royal weddings, family names and lineage, but I shan’t bother you with any of it. We are, after all, only here for the cake!

The Battenberg is still spotted occasionally, although in my opinion it doesn’t seem to be quite as ubiquitous as once it was.

I remember my grandma often serving those unforgettably lurid yellow and pink slices at tea time, along with the other usual suspects, the Swiss roll and the cornflake cake. I must have a go at those at some point, too.

And with the school holidays about to hit us where it hurts, having a few simple child-friendly recipes in the mental Rolodex pays dividends. Especially when, as it is today, you can’t step outside because it’s raining so hard.

A few hours spent baking and working together in a sweet-scented steamy kitchen definitely counts as quality time. And the pleasure of eating the results together doubly so. So let’s crack on, shall we?

It’s not a very difficult recipe, but the assembly is a little bit fiddly, so be prepared, with a large clean and tidy surface for assembling the cakes.

Now, traditionally, the pink part of the cake is made simply by adding colouring to half of the cake mixture, but I thought I’d add a little extra flavour and used a few teaspoons of concentrated strawberry compound (available at www.msk-ingredients.com), but you could always just use red colouring or perhaps even a blob of fruit jam to help differentiate the colours. Aprons on!