Christmas Cake 2010

OK not much time to write this, but for the record, here's the Christmas cake I made this weekend. It's currently wrapped in plastic and I'll ice it in a few weeks.

Christmas Cake

1.5 kg of mixed dried and glacé fruit

I used the following:

• 320 g sultanas
• 320 g raisins, chopped in half
• 300 g currants
• 130 g glacé orange slices, chopped finely
• 165 g glacé red cherries, quartered
• 125 g glacé apricots, chopped
• 140 g glacé pear, chopped

125 mL orange juice (about 2.5 oranges)
125 mL brandy
140 g walnut halves
250 g unsalted butter
230 g light brown sugar
160 g orange marmalade
5 eggs
250 g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg

Pick over the fruit and remove stalks from sultanas and currants, and seeds from the raisins. Combine all the fruit, add the orange juice and brandy, cover with cling film and let it soak overnight, stirring every now and then. [Note: other fruits could include glacé ginger (not popular in our house!), mixed peel (also not popular, but I have compromised by adding the glacé orange slices, which have some peel on them). Glacé figs were available in the shop I went to, but figs have a gritty texture so I avoided them for the cake.]

Next morning, preheat oven to about 160°C (150°C fan-forced) and bake the walnut pieces on a baking tray for 8–10 minutes until lightly browned. Let them cool, chop them up, and add them to the fruit. Put the softened butter, brown sugar and marmalade in the large bowl of an electric mixer and mix until it's light and creamy, then add the eggs one at a time, beating well between each one. Transfer this butter/egg mix to the largest bowl you have.  Sift together the flour, bicarb and spices, and add 1 tbs of this flour mix to the fruit (this makes the fruit a bit sticky and gluggy and prevents it sinking in the cake). Then alternately add the flour mix and the fruit to the butter mix, beginning and ending with the flour (so that's 1/3 flour, half the fruit, 1/3 flour, remaining fruit, remaining flour). Combine it well but don't overdo the mixing.



Put the mix into a double-layer lined and greased 20 cm square tin. Drop the tin on to the bench a few times to dislodge big air pockets, smooth over the top with wet fingers and then wrap the sides of the tin with a few layers of newspaper tied with string. Sit the tin on more newspaper in the oven and bake for 3–3.5 hours. I'd recommend testing it after 2.5 hours, as I used a larger tin so it cooked a bit faster than I would have liked. When the tester comes out clean, take it out of the oven and splash some more brandy (around 1/2–2/3 of a cup) over the top. Cool the cake in the tin, then turn it out, remove the paper and put in an airtight container until it's ready to be iced.


I left the icing far too late—in fact I iced it the day before our work Christmas party—but luckily it turned out OK anyway.  I bought marzipan (without almond essence—yuk!) and Royal icing from the supermarket.  I trimmed the top of the cake to remove the raised edges, then turned it upside down on to a tray. I filled the holes formed by sunken sultanas with little bits of marzipan, then glazed the whole thing with warmed, strained apricot jam. I rolled out the marzipan on a bench dusted with icing sugar to a fairly thin layer (about 3 mm I'd say) and smoothed it over the cake. Then I left it uncovered on top of the kitchen cupboard (out of the way of cats) overnight.  The next morning I rolled out the Royal icing in the same way, this time making it about 7 mm thick (I'd do it thinner next year—it was a bit too sweet).  I washed the marzipan with whisked egg white, smoothed the Royal icing over the top and down the sides, and trimmed the edges with a sharp knife.  It was a last minute icing but I think I got away with it.  A few weeks later the remains of the cake were still really delicious—in fact I think it was getting moister and the layers of icing had really begun to stick together well.