Seasonal Baking
It's mid-November which means that it's that time of year again: time to bake the Christmas cake. The dried fruit and glacé cherries had been soaking in whisky since Monday. I'd checked the recipe to make sure that I'd got everything and belatedly realised that I didn't have a lemon. It requires both the zest and juice, so I put in some bottled lemon juice instead and had to forego the zest.
It's not a difficult recipe but it does take a while to make. I think a lot of the time is taken up with zesting and juicing the lemon! One of the longest steps is creaming together the butter and sugar. The recipe specifies soft brown sugar, but that makes the cake rather pale so I tend to use the darkest brown sugar that I can get to give the cake the darker colour that it should have. Previously I'd got dark muscavado, but this year I found molasses sugar which I've never seen before. It's a very solid block of sugar though so it was not at all easy to cream into the butter, even with an electric mixer!
This is the finished mix. We've always used this Mason Cash earthenware mixing bowl to make the Christmas cake. It originally belonged to my grandma :) I bought some new mixing spoons recently and thought this was a good opportunity to try one out. It's from Kaiser and is silicone with a metal rod through the handle so it could easily manage the strain from the cake mix. It feels really light but it worked very well.
Here's the cake all ready to go into the oven. It's cooked on Gas 2, (150°C/300°F) for 2-2½ hours. It's double-lined with parchment paper and also has brown paper on the outside of the tin. The brown paper protects the cake from the heat of the oven so that it cooks more slowly and evenly. Otherwise the outside would cook too quickly and the middle is underdone. The brown paper should also be taller than the tin to make sure that the top of the cake doesn't get overcooked and burn.
And here is the cooked cake! It is not yet finished. It will be fed with whisky for the next month or so - this involves spooning over a small amount of whisky (or brandy, or rum, or some other spirit with a high alcohol volume) on a regular (fortnightly or weekly) basis in order to keep the cake moist and give it extra flavour. The week or so before Christmas, it will be covered with a layer of marzipan and finally given a liberal coating of royal icing. The supermarket has not had any royal icing sugar for the past few weeks so if I can't get hold of any, it will end up being fondant icing instead which is not the same at all.
It's not a difficult recipe but it does take a while to make. I think a lot of the time is taken up with zesting and juicing the lemon! One of the longest steps is creaming together the butter and sugar. The recipe specifies soft brown sugar, but that makes the cake rather pale so I tend to use the darkest brown sugar that I can get to give the cake the darker colour that it should have. Previously I'd got dark muscavado, but this year I found molasses sugar which I've never seen before. It's a very solid block of sugar though so it was not at all easy to cream into the butter, even with an electric mixer!
This is the finished mix. We've always used this Mason Cash earthenware mixing bowl to make the Christmas cake. It originally belonged to my grandma :) I bought some new mixing spoons recently and thought this was a good opportunity to try one out. It's from Kaiser and is silicone with a metal rod through the handle so it could easily manage the strain from the cake mix. It feels really light but it worked very well.
Here's the cake all ready to go into the oven. It's cooked on Gas 2, (150°C/300°F) for 2-2½ hours. It's double-lined with parchment paper and also has brown paper on the outside of the tin. The brown paper protects the cake from the heat of the oven so that it cooks more slowly and evenly. Otherwise the outside would cook too quickly and the middle is underdone. The brown paper should also be taller than the tin to make sure that the top of the cake doesn't get overcooked and burn.
And here is the cooked cake! It is not yet finished. It will be fed with whisky for the next month or so - this involves spooning over a small amount of whisky (or brandy, or rum, or some other spirit with a high alcohol volume) on a regular (fortnightly or weekly) basis in order to keep the cake moist and give it extra flavour. The week or so before Christmas, it will be covered with a layer of marzipan and finally given a liberal coating of royal icing. The supermarket has not had any royal icing sugar for the past few weeks so if I can't get hold of any, it will end up being fondant icing instead which is not the same at all.