By Sheena Rawcliffe
WITH A little over two months to Christmas, you should now be thinking of making your Christmas cake.
I have used the following recipe for the last 40 years for my Christmas cake and also for five wedding cakes and numerous anniversary ones too. The beauty of this recipe is, that if you only think about making your cake, but keep putting off actually doing it, you can still make a good Christmas cake a couple of weeks before Christmas.
Cakes of whatever variety should always be cooked to be moist and this is certainly the case here.
Preparation:
• Ensure that you have all the ingredients
close to hand.
• Eggs and butter should be
at room temperature.
• Run some warm water into your kitchen
sink and add a little washing up liquid.
Collect the utensils you will need:
• Two Pyrex (or similar) jugs.
• Tablespoons.
• Teaspoons.
• Baking tin.
• Baking tray.
• Baking parchment or greaseproof paper.
• Scissors.
• Knife.
• Food mixer.
• Large mixing bowl.
Ingredients:
• 250g flour.
• Half teaspoon of each of the following:
Ground nutmeg.
Powdered ginger.
Powdered cloves.
Powdered cinnamon.
• 100g ground almonds.
• 100g chopped walnuts.
• 250g chopped glacé cherries.
• 900g dried fruit (your choice of raisins, cur-
rants, sultanas).
• 250g butter.
• 250g soft dark brown sugar.
• 1 orange.
• 1 lemon.
• 3 XL eggs.
• 8 fluid ounces of alcohol (your choice of
port, brandy, dark rum).
• 1 large tbsp dark treacle.
• 1 large tbsp golden syrup.
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
Grease and line your baking tin with a double layer of greaseproof paper.
Place butter and sugar in food mixer and beat at a moderate rate until very soft.
In one jug, place the alcohol, orange and lemon juice, orange and lemon rind and the eggs; beat together lightly.
In the second jug, place the treacle and golden syrup and warm gently in a microwave until slightly warm and runny.
In the large mixing bowl, place approximately half of the flour, the spices and approximately one-third of the fruit and nuts. Stir together lightly.
Now is the time to again ensure that your hands are spotlessly clean.
Add a little of each container to the dried ingredients in the mixing bowl and incorporate well with your hands – yes, your hands. Your hands are the perfect piece of mixing equipment for making this cake.
Continue adding the syrup mix, alcohol mix and butter mix with a small addition of the remaining flour and fruit and nuts, until all the ingredients have been incorporated together.
You should now have a very gloopy (soft and floppy) mix. If your mix feels stiff and dry, add a little more alcohol or orange juice.
Ensure that you have really mixed all the ingredients well – there is nothing worse in a Christmas cake than a pocket of baked flour. This cake is not going to rise very much, if at all, so being concerned about losing the air out of the mixture is not an issue.
Still using your hands, fill your cake tin with this glorious unctuous mixture, pressing the first handful or two into the corners or edges of the tin. When all the mixture is in the tin, give the tin a sharp tap on the work surface to settle it.
Now is the time to decorate the top with whole almonds (resulting in a Dundee Cake), if you prefer not to have a marzipan and icing top.
Place your cake in the centre of the oven, which was preheated to 180ºC, and immediately reduce the temperature to 150ºC.
You may need to reduce the temperature of the oven again if you feel that the top of the cake is getting too brown.
Your cake will take between two and three hours to cook, according to the oven you are using. After two hours of cooking, test the cake by inserting a fine knitting needle or similar item gently into the centre of the cake. The cake is done when the knitting needle has only the slightest amount of mixture left on it.
Turn off the oven, open the door and leave for 20 minutes. Then remove from the oven to cool. This is such a forgiving cake that leaving it to cool in the tin is fine, or you can invert it on to a cake rack.
Remove the greaseproof paper, preferably just before the cake is completely cold. Once cold, wrap the cake in fresh greaseproof paper and cover the whole lot with a good wrapping of aluminium foil and leave for two days.
Over the next days, weeks and months, regularly remove the cake from its wrapping, prick all over with a fine knitting needle and spoon over (feed) with choice of alcohol used in the cooking process. Repackage. Alternate feeding of the cake from the top and the bottom. Feed the cake for the last time two days prior to decorating it.
This is a seriously rich, seriously good rich fruit cake.
