[b]Christmas Cake[/b]
This recipe was determined by going through every recipe book I own and working out the commonalities and difference between all their Christmas and fruit cake recipes. My sums show that the basic recipe is built around a ratio of 1 plain flour: 4 mixed dried fruit. To this is added 1 measure of butter/olive oil 1 measure of brown sugar and eggs. Eggs work out at about 3 plus per cup measure 8 per kilo measure 4 per lb measure.
Soak the fruit first overnight in brandy/rum/sweet sherry.
Blackstrap molasses/treacle/golden syrup gives more flavour.
Dried fruit can be a real variety depending on what you have in your cupboard or your imagination: raisins dried apricots dried figs dried persimmons dates prunes (take out the pits!) sultanas glace cherries mixed glace citrus peels.
You can prepare ahead by saving citrus (orange lemon mandarin grapefruit cumquat) peel. Slice it very thinly and boil briefly with quite a bit of sugar. Keep for making Christmas cakes.
I leave nuts out of Christmas cakes because they can be hard on teeth but some recipes include them. For the same reason we don’t put in the boiled threepences that my nana used to put in Christmas cakes.
Spices to add are: 1 tspn ginger (fresh goes very well) 1 tspn cinnamon 1/2 tspn nutmeg 1/4 tspn ground cloves.
Essences to add are: 1 tspn lemon essence 1 tspn almond essence 1 tspn rum essence 1/2 tspn orange flower water.
Turn oven on slow (about 150 degrees).
Line a big cake tin with oven paper or alfoil.
Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs soaked fruit. Sift in flour. Add essences and spices. Mix together with a spoon.
Pour into cake tin. It should be about 2/3rd full.
Cook slowly for 2-3 hours. After 2 hours start testing whether it is cooked by piercing with a wooden skewer and see if it comes out dry.
When you take it out of the oven you can press a ring of almonds into the top and glaze with gelatine.
I always imagined fruit cakes were a cooking Mt Everest. In fact this is a very easy recipe. Clean out the dry fruit in your cupboard. Own the right size cake tin. Not much else to it. We often end up making about 3 over Christmas as they get eaten pretty quickly.