Christmas Countdown: An easy two step ‘personalised’ Christmas cake
One of the things that fascinates me about cooking is the alchemy: why you need x when you bake with y, or how one ingredient affects the others in a dish. This nosiness (teamed with an endless desire to be baking), often leads to disaster, but hey, if you don’t make mistakes you never learn.
I dislike the snobbery surrounding food, and, like Nigel Slater, believe a recipe is a guideline, not a set of rules to be blindly followed. Take Christmas cake. I’m sure a lot of people look at a Christmas cake recipe, with its lists of dried fruit in various quantities, and feel thoroughly intimidated, but hey, it’s just fruit cake, so I’m going to let you have the basic proportions and let you customise your own cake. Don’t like raisins? No problem. Hate peel (disgusting, devil’s toenails that it is), leave it out.
If you’re a Christmas cake ‘virgin’, then this is the recipe for you. If you sort all your ingredients before you start, there are basically two steps. Easy peasy. As long as you have the basic quantities right, your cake will come out perfectly and more to the point, exactly as you like it. My ultimate aim is to make a Christmas cake with stuff I’ve got lying around and not have to rush to the supermarket with a list as long as my arm for stuff I’m never going to use again. I’ve wittered on a bit here so if you want, just skip to the cake recipe.
Dried Fruit
One rule here: choose what you like. As I mentioned above, I hate peel with a vengeance so I leave it out. Other people use glacé fruits, snipped into little pieces. I used a 300g luxury pack of mixed raisins, apricots and cranberries which I saw in a nice foodie place and bought, then topped it up with random half packs of leftover cranberries, prunes (chopped into pieces), dried apricots and sultanas. Pick what suits you, bin the rest.
Butter vs Oil
Generally if you need lightness in a cake, butter helps as you can beat in air and it holds it well, but I’m finding I’m using more and more oil, (you can whisk it with the eggs and get a similar airy effect), especially Rapeseed, which adds a subtle nutty flavour and, being rich in vitamin E, high in Omega 3 and half the saturated fat of olive oil is obviously a healthy option. In this recipe you want the moistness, etc, but not the air, so use oil if you like. I made this cake with Borderfields‘ gorgeously yellow rapeseed oil, which is my absolute favourite and it turned out perfectly. There’s obviously a bit of water content in butter, so if you’re substituting oil use slightly less. Having said that, don’t kill yourself (you know me, I don’t do adding up): 100g of butter will be about 90 – 100ml oil.
Sugar
Again, use what you’ve got – the darker the sugar, the more treacly the taste. I used Muscovado. You’re melting it, so it doesn’t matter how big the granulation is.
Honey
The honey here gives moistness and sweetness, but you could substitute golden syrup if you don’t like (or are allergic to) honey. I used Rowse Supahoney with lemon, because I absolutely love its taste (I’m a bit into Manuka honey) and use it all the time so I had a pot open. You could also use black treacle which gives a lovely dark toffee taste.
The Booze
No rules here. Last year I used Morgan’s Spiced Rum which has a gorgeous vanilla flavour but not much sweetness. I’ve mentioned a bit more in the recipe below about sweetness. I used cherry brandy, which not only has that lovely sweet cherry taste, but gives an almondy hit too. Use whatever you like/whatever you have. Again, taste your mixture and adjust sweetness accordingly. If you don’t want to use alcohol, just double up on the fruit juice.
Fruit Juice
I used cranberry juice, because I thought it would go nicely with the dried cranberries, but you can use freshly squeezed orange juice (bung in the zest too for an extra zing), or juice out of a carton. It honestly doesn’t matter.
Spice
I make a lot of curries so my spice turnover is quite high. All I would say is, if the jar of ‘Mixed Spice’ in your cupboard was purchased in the 1940s it’s not going to add much to your cake. I used 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp ground ginger and a good grating of nutmeg, but use what you have: mixed spice/ginger/cinnamon/ground nutmeg (not too much, it can be overpowering). Just make sure it’s fresh.
Right, ingredients sorted? Then we’re off:
The Personalised Christmas Cake
800g dried fruit
175ml good quality rapeseed oil or 200g butter
200g dark brown sugar
4 tbsp honey
120ml alcohol
120ml fruit juice (or two oranges, juiced)
About 2tsp spice
3 eggs
200g self raising flour (or 300g flour and omit ground almonds).
100g ground almonds
Firstly: sort everything out: preheat the oven to gas 2/150 C and double line the bottom of your cake tin/tins with parchment paper (tiger stripe pattern optional). Weigh all your stuff, crack the eggs into a bowl and mix them… just get yourself completely ready.
STEP ONE: Pop the dried fruit into a large saucepan along with the butter, sugar, honey, booze, fruit juice and spices. Stir gently over a low heat until the butter is melted and the sugar is completely dissolved. You can bring it up to a gentle bubble, but don’t let it boil vigorously as your alcohol will disappear.
Now leave it to cool. If you add the eggs straight in, they’ll be scrambled. Oh, and at this stage, have a taste! If it doesn’t taste sweet enough, add something else sweet (this is often the case if you’ve used brandy or whisky which doesn’t have much natural sweetness, as opposed to, say, a liqueur – Nigella suggests a tablespoon of marmalade, which I think is a great idea). If it’s overpoweringly, cloyingly sweet, then a squeeze of lemon, maybe? It’s your cake – do it how you like it.
STEP TWO: When cooled, stir in the eggs, flour and ground almonds. Pile into your one large springform tin, or two smaller ones and bake for about an hour and a half for the two small ones, or up to two hours for the large. Test by pushing a skewer into the centre of the cake. It should come out clean (excuse the rubbish ‘in-oven’ shot here).
And that’s it! Congratulations, you’ve made a Christmas cake (or two).
When cool, wrap up the cake in parchment paper and then foil, and stash somewhere until you need it, occasionally unwrapping your gorgeous present to stab it with a cocktail stick and slosh with a couple of tablespoons of your chosen booze. Or just eat straight away.
You can do all that fancy pants marzipan and icing stuff, but for god’s sake don’t look to me for inspiration. I have the artistic ability of a small pickled onion.
Make sure you write your recipe down. You just created a family heirloom!
You’ve actually made me seriously excited about making a Christmas cake this year!
xx
Although, if I made it to my *tastes* it would have no dried fruit in it at all
(PS WHERE did you get the lining??)
You must be suffocating under a Christmas cake mountain, woman!
Can’t remember. A really nice lady from Sweden or somewhere sent me a load in the post. Will try to find her email address for you x
May try that with cranberries/cherries (will report back..)
Ooh a Christmas cake candle – how awesome *goes off to google*
PS I am OK with the brandy butter….
I will stop bothering you now…..
This sounds really easy to personalise and you have tempted me into having a go. Just need the wind to drop so that I dont get blown away while going to shop for the ingredients.
I’ve made my Christmas cake already- an orange and whiskey influenced one (no peel, but lots of cherries). Drowning it in Glenfiddich every week now until the big icing!
[...] cookalong got me into the Christmas spirit though – and just yesterday I made my version of English Mum’s Christmas Cake to bring home with me at [...]
Better still the kids don’t usually eat fruit cake so I can turn my leftover liqueur fruit and some other bits and pieces into an adults only boozy christmas cake hopefully.
Brilliant stuff. Thanks EM