who all has started making their Christmas fruitcakes?

[Pleater]

My own Christmas cake recipe is involved in one of the stories of the MHICE - they are in the misc section - the search function should find them.

I used it for my wedding cake, but absent mindedly forgot to double the fruit portion - there are different parts to the recipe. It was necessary to improvise, but it worked out. I made the marzipan and hard icing and piped the decoration.

I add vermouth to the fruit mixture. It only needs a couple of weeks to taste mature - though it is, apparently quite an experience if left for several months in an enclosed tin.

Some years I make a Twelfth cake, which is for the 6th of January, and consists mostly of the largest raisins I can find, three colours of glace cherries, lots of whole nuts and a silly little amount of batter to stick them together, baked in a ring tin - there should be two made and put together to make a torus shape.

In my native Yorkshire fruitcake is traditionally eaten with a white crumbly cheese, usually Cheshire but I have bought something similar in Leicestershire, a local farmhouse cheese.

The family's traditional Christmas Cake is not iced, it is cooked in a deep loaf tin and has whole almonds placed on the top about 2/3rds the way through the cooking time. Sponges are cooked in round tins, but brown cakes are always square - my Wedding cake was square. I even have a photo of it - almost 32 years old.



Anne the Pleater :ootd: