bake a christmas cake

Unfortunately, as I was triumphantly slicing open the cake in front of the Wallace and Gromit Christmas special, K turned to me, somewhat tremulously, and confessed that he didn’t actually care much for Christmas cake.
Naturally, I was a little irked at first after over a month’s hard labour on the thing, until I realised that what this essentially meant was DOUBLE CAKE RATIONS FOR ME!

(potato) marzipanned the cake! Hopefully I’ll be able to find real icing sugar before we ice it at the weekend. We also made mince pies – can you believe K had never had a mince pie??? I know he’s a fussy eater, but frankly, that’s taking the piss!
Naturally, K had them pose with the Christmas triceratops skeleton (perhaps I overdid the brandy?)

Now I need to fathom marzipan and icing!

In the meantime, the house is festooned with Christmassy things, but the snow has all melted away, which is surprisingly unnerving, as we are used to four inches a day, every day, for five months. Everyone in the town is quite perplexed about it, and it’s the only topic of conversation to be found at the green grocer’s, train station or DIY centre: what’s happened to the snow?!

• Got a recipe (trusty old Delia online).

• Got a kilo of raisins.

• Got brandy, though this was quite a mission and involved K having to walk around the town for two hours peering into shops and trying to explain what brandy is; eventually tough he found a lovely bottle at 50% off and the shop owner invited him into his kitchen for coffee and took his photo to put up on his blog.

• Got a bigger cake tin.

• Last night we mixed the dried fruit with the brandy and left it to soak; tonight we’ll bake the cake proper! Am a bit concerned as at the moment there’s more fruit than there is cake tin and we still have to add the flour, etc, but I followed the quantities exactly and Delia is never wrong!

Iced and everything. There is of course still half of the bloody thing left but it is tasty!

The delay in counting this done is because of a delay in loading up the Christmas pictures. Honest it was completed by December 20th in time for mulled wine and Christmas pizza. Definitely worth doing next year.

I made it two weeks ago from the recipe in Nigella’s How to be a Domestic Godess book and it has been sitting in my novelty tin since then. Today I peeled back the layers of foil and generously fed it with Marsala . Plan – get everyone who eats it tipsy so they think wow what good cake! My mum makes a cake every year but then forgets to ice it until she remebers about it on New Years eve. I wont mark this as done until it is iced.

It was beautiful. I just hope it tastes good come christmas. good ole delia smith.

It was a bit too blackened around the edges, despite only being in the oven for the minimum amount of time, and I added a sheet of greaseproof paper over the top to try to protect it. This has been a problem before, next year I think I’ll try it on a cooler oven.
“Consumer tests” on the burned bits prove it to be very tasty nonetheless.
Now to feed with brandy until Christmas (and try not to eat it before then!)

It’s now in the oven. There was a near-disaster when as I was putting it into the oven the first time I realised I hadn’t added the baking powder, so I took it out and mixed it in. I’m not sure whether it’s going to be alright or not, but I have enough ingredients to try again if not! Anyway, it’s full of lots of delicious ingredients and will probably be tasty even if it is a bit fallen.
If I bake another cake do I get another wish?

I went to market bright and early this morning to buy ingredients for cake. More accurately, I was up dark and early as it was before dawn.
Early Saturday morning is slightly wrong from this side of sleep, but no matter. It’s so easy to spend entire days doing nothing, especially at the weekend, so it’s good to have tasks to do early in the day to make sure I make something of the day at all.
I’m using a Delia Smith recipe I’ve used before, so I’m quite confident this is going to go well.
To the kitchen!