Hard to believe just over a week to go until you know who arrives.
Today’s Adventure: Making a Christmas cake is so not happening this year.
Jam Fact: I make a Christmas cake pretty much every year.
I have a fantastic Christmas cake recipe; it has a good wack of grog in it and lots of fruit so it tastes pretty special. My friend G who is an excellent cook, shared the recipe with me some years ago.
It’s pretty much a no fail fruit cake…well it has been a tried and true cake for me almost every year since being gifted the recipe. I don’t count the year I forgot to actually turn the oven on to the right temperature…as you can imagine even after 6 hours in the oven and much poking with the skewer to check if it was done, there was just not enough oven heat, so of course it came out underdone.
I discovered, after much typing into Ms Google… ‘help my fruit cake is still pretty much in its raw state’… that you can’t recook a half cooked fruit cake [even my 1948 CWA cook book says so] but the very good downside of that was that it tasted pretty nice as a very heavy duty pudding when micro waved and eaten with custard and ice cream [MY J had cream as well]. So, all was not a total loss but no actual cake of mine was eaten that year.
A cake made with these little UNYOUNG hands is yet to reach my oven so far this year too. I did get as far as putting the recipe out on the bench and half making the shopping list for it but now I fear it is way too late to even contemplate a mix but I am pleased to see that making fruit cakes has gone on in other ovens, especially in commercial ones.
MY J is a mad fruit cake lover [ me not so much] and so I have been purchasing a few from across the store bought ranges on offer and we have been sampling said cakes; yes me too, I may even become a fruit cake lover yet as I have discovered it is not bad with my L.B. We are currently on to our 5th sample and are yet to declare any of them winners.
It won’t be long before MY J announces his best fruit cake of the year winner though. It will without a doubt go to my Friend G’s cake. G has annually for many years given us a Christmas cake made from her very own recipe… that very same fantastic recipe that I have not got around to making one of this very year.
G’s is the best fruit cake ever and even I, a converted fruit cake lover, can’t resist it’s superb taste.
Until next time …enjoy the fruits of your labour.
My favourite gum blossom is just bursting into flower.
