Christmas Cake 2012 - Part 2

After a few weeks soaking in the brandy syrup, it's time to bake the fruit into the cake. The cake is always cooked at half term, giving a good few weeks of feeding before Christmas.

I baked the cake according to the secret family recipe, but left out an ounce of sugar to make up for the syrup, then baked for hours and hours until cooked through.

This is my little girl's third year of making the cake with me and properly joined in this year, although I had to stop her doing her usual trick of eating handfuls of the cake mixture: far too much brandy!

Christmas cake 2012 - part 1

Soon after marrying my husband I was presented with the top secret family Christmas cake recipe, and all but one year since (I was in the process of losing a few stone...) I have made my cake around the October half term, to this recipe.
Whenever I use dried fruit in baking I always 'soak' the fruit (microwave with sprinkle of water / something stronger and leave to stand covered for as long as I have) as it improves the moistness and stops raisins burning on the top (I hate that taste!)
However, when I saw a recent blog post from Ruth Clements, I knew I needed to modify the recipe to include a longer soak, as it's such a good idea.

I've used the usual weight of fruit from my family recipe substituting in a few figs (from Ruth's recipe) and using pureed mixed peel, an idea from Jo Wheatley's book. I've soaked in the orange juice sugar syrup and brandy, as Ruth's recipe says, and added a drop each of lemon and orange extract. It smells (and tastes!) fab already!

I'll soak for about 4 weeks, rather than the suggested 6, but I'm already excited to see how this year's cake turns out!

Christmas cake 2011

I decided to try a little fondant modelling on this cake, and followed some instructions online (I'm sorry I don't know where from) to create these cute little penguins. I made some cupcakes first as a practice run and loved how they turned out so made two big penguins for the cake.