Christmas cake

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Yes I know I’m rather late with my Christmas-related posts! We always make a Christmas cake, even though the girls won’t actually eat it. I eat it although I’m not crazy about it, and my partner enjoys it. Then we have the issue of icing. My partner loves an inch-thick layer of the traditional break-your-teeth style royal icing, adhered to the cake with the thinnest possible layer of marzipan, while to my mind a thin sheen of icing is all that’s needed to keep the delicious marzipan from drying out! In spite of all this we faithfully make a Christmas cake every year, partly so we can all participate in the traditional ceremony of stirring the mixture and making a wish, and partly so we can decorate the finished article which the girls love doing. Last year we decided to try a new approach. We made the mixture as usual but baked it in a large roasting tin. That produced a large flat cake so we had more surface area to decorate. As a bonus it was also quicker to cook. This time we decided to do the same again. And I tweaked the recipe a little too. Even though I generally like fruit cake I always find the traditional Christmas cake a bit bitter, so this time I substituted dried cherries and cranberries for the usual currants, and I like it much better! (Strange really, as I like currants in things like Eccles cakes). And then we went a bit crazy with the decorations. As you can see there’s quite a selection. One or two we bought recently, some I bought years ago, some date from my childhood and some even from my mother’s childhood. Are we the only family who still have cake decorations about 100 years old? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2024.