Mr Kipling Battenberg - 230g

Battenberg sits firmly in the British teatime crowd, alongside the Victoria sponge and the Bakewell tart. Mr Kipling made it a supermarket regular, so it turned up in lunchboxes, on church hall tables and on the plate at every relative's house.

People in Canada go looking for it because a slice with a cup of tea at four o'clock is one of those small habits that never quite travels. And the checkerboard is very hard to explain to anyone who has not seen one cut open.

It is a whole cake, ready for you to slice. It lives in our freezer, so let it come back to room temperature before the knife goes in. Thin slices make it last the week. Thick slices make it last the afternoon.

Most baskets with a Battenberg in them also have a box of proper British tea bags nearby, and quite often another Mr Kipling cake for later. Nobody has ever regretted that.