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It's basically a dense fruit cake, to which is added a variable amount of booze. Some families make it a tradition to make the cake earlier in the year, then get it out of a cupboard every so often to "feed" it with more alcohol.
I'm not a huge fan, not enough to make one anyway, but if I'm offered a slice in the festive season, I won't answer in the negative.
There are plenty of recipes floating about, but this looks like a fairly decent one, albeit without the intermittent feeding.
The Christmas Cake in that photo looks like more of a 'standard' fruit cake. It's my impression that a standard fruit cake has become more of a norm these days, which i'm guessing is partly due to supermarkets wanting to make their own brand store-bought Christmas Cakes cheaper by replacing some of the fruit and nuts with actual cake. Traditional Christmas Cake, at least the way that i, my mother, and my grandmother (going by the 'Radiation Cook Book' i inherited that was once my Grandmothers) made and make it is much more densely packed with fruit. My own recipe, based on those inherited recipes from the 1920/30s and 1980s, is about 4:3 ratio of fruit and nuts to cake (by weight including all the fats in the cake itself, but not the marzipan and icing on top). The cake looks like it should barely hold the fruit together. The photo of the cake in the recipe Kevin links to looks a bit more typical, though the recipe is gluten free, which obviously isn't traditional, as it were, and also that recipe lacks black treacle, which would give the cake a darker hue still.
ReplyDeleteKevin wrote (in a reply in a previous post) that Christmas Cake has white marzipan icing, which is both correct and incorrect. Christmas Cake has a layer of marzipan and then a layer of icing. People tend to use icing sugar for the sugar component in the marzipan and as such the marzipan on a Christmas Cake is often effectively a 'marzipan icing', but then even a more 'rustic' marzipan (with less ground up ground almonds and larger sugar granules) has a more or less icing like consistency. Thanks to my mother's baking genius, i now use white chocolate (or a vegan equivalent) instead of icing. That isn't traditional either... yet.
Wow, I think that's one of the most detailed comments I've ever had here. Thanks!
DeleteThat looks like a crime scene!
ReplyDeleteWhile we’re on the subject of British Christmas cakes, please explain the classic yule log to me. I’ve only seen it on tv and it looks absolutely massive - in a good way!
(And thinking about it, are British cakes just an excuse to hide booze in? Mince pies, fruit cakes…)
Christmas baking does seem like an excuse to bring out the booze, which probably says something about the British character! The rest of the year the baking is less alcoholic!
DeleteGood question about the yule log. I don't know when or how it went from an actual log you burned at Christmas to a chocolate sponge cake, but I grew up with the latter and only later discovered the former.
DeleteMost of the chocolate logs you buy are small, maybe 30cm long at best, but there's of course nothing stopping you making your own at any size.
I think the booze is about preservation, or was originally. When these recipes for fruitier and fruiter, spicier and spicier cakes and puddings and pies were coming about during the British Empire these fruits and spices were exotic in Britain and took long journeys to get to Britain and i imagine they could sit around for a long time before they were used in their preserved forms in the winter. They would also get posted abroard. I've come across one story of a Christmas Pudding arriving in time to be consumed the following Christmas and having the outer, slightly moldy layer cut off.
DeleteYes, I imagine preservation was at least part of the origin.
DeleteThat anonymous preservation comment was from me. For some reason my name didn't get included that time.
DeleteWow, you weren't kidding about the decorating. It makes me think a bit of the gingerbread house sets you can buy (at least here in the States, don't know if it's a thing in the U.K.). Although I'm not sure whether anyone expects to actually eat those, or just dress them up pretty.
ReplyDeleteMy mom doesn't make anything this elaborate, but she does make these orange slice cakes, that are like little fruitcake loaves, or in some cases big muffins, but they have chopped up bits of a kind of chewy orange candy mixed in with the nuts and the fruit and whatnot.
Those look like tasty muffins!
DeleteIntrigued by the scenario playing out on top of that cake. Presumably the snowman is a big boss of some sort? Has that huge bird taken the deer by surprise?
ReplyDeleteRoll for initiative!
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