A Cake of Great Importance
It had been decided a few weeks ago, that I would be making a gluten-free Christmas cake. When I went to the Allergy Show in Liverpool last year, Glutafin were giving out free samples of a cake (all marzipanned and iced) made to their recipe. It was actually really tasty so I got a copy of the recipe but it didn't get used because my mother had already bought a cake. It got forgotten about until a few weeks ago when I made the mistake of asking my mother what she was intending on doing about a cake this year.
So there was baking this weekend. It seems to have become par for the course that whenever I bake there is always some kind of drama. And this weekend was no exception.
The first stage was soaking the dried fruit in the alcohol of choice - Johnny Walker was the preference this year. Generally, my mother does this 2-3 days in advance - putting all the dried fruit in a dish, pouring over a decent glug of whisky and letting it do its thing. However, the recipe specified soaking the fruit as well:Place soaking mix ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Cover and microwave for 5 minutes or until the butter has just started to melt. Stir and cook for a further 5 minutes or until the mixture is just simmering. Stir and set aside to soak for a minimum of 8 hours or overnight.
So on Thursday morning, I got the fruit soaking in the whisky with the intention of doing the melted butter after tea on Friday. Except that I completely forgot about it until 9.30pm on Friday night... The first stumbling block was finding a dish big enough to hold all the fruit that would also fit in the microwave. There was a HELL of a lot of fruit too. My mother had decided that an 8 inch cake wouldn't be big enough so I was adding half again. The original quantities were:
560g/20oz Mixed Dried Fruit
50g/2oz Glacé cherries (halved)
225g/8oz Butter
225g/8oz Dark soft brown sugar
2 x 15ml tbsp Black treacle
2 Large oranges (grated zest and 150ml/1/4pt juice)
I ended up having to use the lid of a Pyrex chicken roasting dish! The worst bit was having to zest and juice 3 large oranges, that bit took ages. That's just what you want to be doing at that time of night as well. And trying to peer into the microwave to see when the mix was starting to simmer was fun too, considering a microwave door is impossible to see through. Thankfully, by half past 10 it was all done and put to one side to soak over night. This was what it looked like in the morning when the butter had risen to the surface and tried to set:
Yum! It's kind of hard to judge how big that dish is from the angle of the picture, but it's pretty big.
The instructions for the actual cake making were pretty straight-forward so I thought it wouldn't take that long to do:
Place Glutafin Mix into a large mixing bowl with the remaining cake mix ingredients. Stir in the soaked fruit mix with a wooden spoon and beat together until combined.
So I set to putting the remaining ingredients into our largest mixing bowl. Obviously, I had to do one and a half times all the ingredients which ended up being:
450g/16½oz Glutafin Select Gluten Free Multi-purpose Fibre Mix
165g/6oz Ground almonds
3 x 5ml tsp Ground mixed spice
6 Medium eggs
Just the flour mix on its own was enough to half fill the bowl! I was a little worried until I realised that it wouldn't be as much once I'd got the eggs mixed in. Even though I was using large eggs rather than the medium specified, there was still an awful lot of dry ingredients to the amount of wet ones. It was really stiff and I was seriously struggling to even move the spoon. And then this happened:
Yep. I managed to snap the wooden spoon in half. My mother was not impressed as she'd had that spoon for years; she got it when we lived in Germany and it's nothing like the ones we have here so it's rather irreplaceable. Bad Nathaniel :( Once I'd got it all combined, I had to check the recipe to make sure I'd not got one for biscuits instead because the mixture was looking remarkably like dough. Then I had the fun of trying to stir all of that fruit into a solid lump in a bowl that wasn't big enough. I did it in two halves, putting half the dough-mixture into the fruit and several large spoons of fruit into the dough-mix. It wasn't easy to mix it together at all, I had to sort of smear the dough-mixture with a spatula and work in the juice from the fruit until it thinned enough to actually resemble cake mixture. Then I got it all back into the mixing bowl and stirred both halves together. I was so glad to get it in the tin and in the oven.
The original 8 inch cake was supposed to take 3-4 hours to cook so I expected this one would be more like 5-6. As it was, it didn't take longer than 4 after all, so that was good! And it looked pretty damn good when it came out too, considering the palaver there was making it.
I'm really impressed with how flat the top is! I don't think even my mother has been able to do that and she's a really good baker. This morning, it got covered with marzipan. I let my mother do that because she's better at it than I am ;)
Even though the top of the cake was bee-you-tifully flat, she still turned it upside-down. And even though it was a bigger cake than we were expecting, there's lots of marzipan left over. Yum yum. Next step will be the royal icing and decorating but that won't be till next week once the jam has set.
So there was baking this weekend. It seems to have become par for the course that whenever I bake there is always some kind of drama. And this weekend was no exception.
The first stage was soaking the dried fruit in the alcohol of choice - Johnny Walker was the preference this year. Generally, my mother does this 2-3 days in advance - putting all the dried fruit in a dish, pouring over a decent glug of whisky and letting it do its thing. However, the recipe specified soaking the fruit as well:Place soaking mix ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Cover and microwave for 5 minutes or until the butter has just started to melt. Stir and cook for a further 5 minutes or until the mixture is just simmering. Stir and set aside to soak for a minimum of 8 hours or overnight.
So on Thursday morning, I got the fruit soaking in the whisky with the intention of doing the melted butter after tea on Friday. Except that I completely forgot about it until 9.30pm on Friday night... The first stumbling block was finding a dish big enough to hold all the fruit that would also fit in the microwave. There was a HELL of a lot of fruit too. My mother had decided that an 8 inch cake wouldn't be big enough so I was adding half again. The original quantities were:
560g/20oz Mixed Dried Fruit
50g/2oz Glacé cherries (halved)
225g/8oz Butter
225g/8oz Dark soft brown sugar
2 x 15ml tbsp Black treacle
2 Large oranges (grated zest and 150ml/1/4pt juice)
I ended up having to use the lid of a Pyrex chicken roasting dish! The worst bit was having to zest and juice 3 large oranges, that bit took ages. That's just what you want to be doing at that time of night as well. And trying to peer into the microwave to see when the mix was starting to simmer was fun too, considering a microwave door is impossible to see through. Thankfully, by half past 10 it was all done and put to one side to soak over night. This was what it looked like in the morning when the butter had risen to the surface and tried to set:
Yum! It's kind of hard to judge how big that dish is from the angle of the picture, but it's pretty big.
The instructions for the actual cake making were pretty straight-forward so I thought it wouldn't take that long to do:
Place Glutafin Mix into a large mixing bowl with the remaining cake mix ingredients. Stir in the soaked fruit mix with a wooden spoon and beat together until combined.
So I set to putting the remaining ingredients into our largest mixing bowl. Obviously, I had to do one and a half times all the ingredients which ended up being:
450g/16½oz Glutafin Select Gluten Free Multi-purpose Fibre Mix
165g/6oz Ground almonds
3 x 5ml tsp Ground mixed spice
6 Medium eggs
Just the flour mix on its own was enough to half fill the bowl! I was a little worried until I realised that it wouldn't be as much once I'd got the eggs mixed in. Even though I was using large eggs rather than the medium specified, there was still an awful lot of dry ingredients to the amount of wet ones. It was really stiff and I was seriously struggling to even move the spoon. And then this happened:
Yep. I managed to snap the wooden spoon in half. My mother was not impressed as she'd had that spoon for years; she got it when we lived in Germany and it's nothing like the ones we have here so it's rather irreplaceable. Bad Nathaniel :( Once I'd got it all combined, I had to check the recipe to make sure I'd not got one for biscuits instead because the mixture was looking remarkably like dough. Then I had the fun of trying to stir all of that fruit into a solid lump in a bowl that wasn't big enough. I did it in two halves, putting half the dough-mixture into the fruit and several large spoons of fruit into the dough-mix. It wasn't easy to mix it together at all, I had to sort of smear the dough-mixture with a spatula and work in the juice from the fruit until it thinned enough to actually resemble cake mixture. Then I got it all back into the mixing bowl and stirred both halves together. I was so glad to get it in the tin and in the oven.
The original 8 inch cake was supposed to take 3-4 hours to cook so I expected this one would be more like 5-6. As it was, it didn't take longer than 4 after all, so that was good! And it looked pretty damn good when it came out too, considering the palaver there was making it.
I'm really impressed with how flat the top is! I don't think even my mother has been able to do that and she's a really good baker. This morning, it got covered with marzipan. I let my mother do that because she's better at it than I am ;)
Even though the top of the cake was bee-you-tifully flat, she still turned it upside-down. And even though it was a bigger cake than we were expecting, there's lots of marzipan left over. Yum yum. Next step will be the royal icing and decorating but that won't be till next week once the jam has set.