Easy Christmas Cake

I have already posted this recipe along with a slightly more complicated one near the start of this blog.

I made my Christmas cake a bit late this year a couple of weeks ago so I went for the easy recipe. 

Now we are 'feeding' it - a shot glass of brandy every couple of weeks.  It doesn't need it. and never got this treatment when my Mum made it, but then we don't have any youngsters around our Christmas table.
 Easy Christmas Cake


Put 3 lb mixed dried fruit in a pot with

8 oz brown sugar,
8 oz butter,
1 Tb glycerine and
1 cup water.
Boil 10 minutes and leave to cool.

Separate 4 eggs and beat the white and yolk separately. Add the beaten egg components time about with

1 lb flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
2 tsp pMixed Spice

Bake in a lined 9" deep tin in a slow oven (about 130C) for 3.5 hours

 

Post on icing it coming soon.

No. 49 - Steamed Loaf Take 2 - Fruit Tea Loaf

Now I have produced a firm (very firm) dense loaf which cuts easily and tidily into slices and can be buttered without falling to pieces and sticking to the butter-loaded knife.

Much better – possibly even too far the other way.    The recipe calls for self-raising flour and the only SR flour I had was wholemeal.  Too much bran.  On review I think that I would recommend 50/50 plain/wholemeal SR flour.

This amount made my three little tins and a 1 lb loaf tin which I baked in a tray of water in the oven.

 

Fruit Tea Loaf

500 g mixed fruit

1.5 cups of strong tea (use more if you are going for the full bran experience of wholemeal flour)
250 g caster sugar

Soak all this together for a few hours (preferably overnight)

1 egg

500 g self-raising flour  (or half/half wholemeal/plain self raising flour)
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp grated nutmeg

Stir the egg into the soaked fruit and sift in the dry ingredients.  Mix well and spoon it into your prepared baking (or steaming) tins.  Steam for 1 hour.

You will need a 2lb loaf tin if you are baking it (1 hour at 170 degrees C – fan oven).  I suggest that you stand the loaf tin in a roasting dish with an inch of so of water in it.

No 27 - Honey Fruit Cake

The bees have been looking for new homes.  We ran out of hives to put them in.  Meanwhile someone from Mr B’s beekeeping class, having had a run of bad luck with his bees, decided that perhaps this was not for him and offered us his three hives – sans bees of course, but still laden with stores that his bees had put away before departing his ‘care and control’ (if bees could ever be said to be within anyone’s control; as we have discovered).

The honey contained in these frames was set completely solid so the only way to ‘extract’ it was to cut the whole lot from the frames, pile it into a cauldron and heat it very gently.  At about the halfway mark I have bottled up about 6-8lb of very dark rich honey, and set aside a couple of good sized slabs of wax for soap making.  Because the honey has been heated I will keep it all at home for baking and making mueslei.

I thought I had a recipe somewhere for a fruit cake that used a lb (454gm) honey but I can’t find it, so searched the web and found a great selection of honey recipes on this website. I like to promote beekeeping and beekeeping websites, so you will find this in my list of links as well.

I modified this recipe to use only Mixed Dried Fruit, then doubled it, and I boiled my fruit (which was a bit hard and dry) in a whole 440ml can of Guinness, and proceeded from there.  The cake is definitely rich, with strong honey flavours and just a hint of Guinness.  Even sliced up and packed in a large plastic box it survived the motorbike ride in my backpack.

Honey Rich Fruit Cake

4oz. Mixed Dried Fruit

4oz. Sultanas

4oz. Dates

2oz. Dried Apricots

2oz. Cherries

 ¼ Pint Beer

4oz. Butter

6oz. Honey

2 Eggs

4oz. Plain Flour

4oz. Whole Self-Raising Flour

½ Tsp Spice

Cream butter and honey together. Beat eggs and add alternatively with sifted flour and salt to creamed mixture. Add fruit and enough beer if necessary to give a dropping consistency.

Turn into well greased 7 inch round tin (or 2lb. loaf tin) and bake on middle shelf for about 1¼ - 1½ hours in a pre-heated oven (300°F/150°C)

Allow to cool a little then turn out onto wire cake stand and leave to cool.

No 22 - FTC Square

 FTC Square (uncooked)

In 1979 when I left home to joint he NZ Forest Service, vast tracts of man-made pine forest marching across the NZ landscape were still owned by the State.  I started work for the government.  Our training was carried out in Rotorua where resided the main research and educational facility for production forestry in NZ.  The Forest Training Centre had one of those (even then) old-fashioned institutions – the tea lady.  The tea-lady is an endangered species.  Ours was delightful.  She served tea from an enormous enamel pot propelled from room to room on a trolley; and she supplemented her wage by baking and selling alongside the tea a few biscuits or squares.  There was one variety each day.  She came from the Keep it Simple School of Catering  - you either bought it or you didn’t.  Mind you, she knew what would sell, and most remarkably, gave me some of her reipes.  So I’ll share this one with you.

Note: In New Zealand we have a malted wheat flake ‘biscuit’ which we eat as a breakfast cereal that goes under the brand name ‘Weetbix’.  In some other parts of the world these things exist with spelling variations, but a recognizably similar name.

FTC Square

9 crushed Weetbix

1 cup desiccated coconut

4 oz  melted butter

½ tin of sweetened condensed milk (called Highlander in NZ, Carnation in UK)

1 cup of mixed fruit (fruit cake mix)

¾ TB cocoa

Mix all that up and press it into a lined sponge roll tin (about 8” x 12”).  Ice with lemon or orange icing. 

It improves with being stored for 2-3 days.

No 10 - Ngaire Clarke's Easy Fruit Cake

Ngaire Clarke’s Easy Fruit Cake

Ngaire (or her husband) was some distant cousin of my maternal grandmother.  When I left home aged 16 and started work in the NZ Forest Service, Ngaire and Roy were people I could call on in the nearest town to our forestry camp.  Roy regaled me with takes of his days as an engineer working on hydro-electric dam construction and Ngaire fed me tea and cake.

This one is a beauty, best eaten really fresh.  Loved, it was recently adopted by one of my French colleagues who tells me that the  French don’t have a tradition of heavy fruit cakes, but that she would tell her family this was an English Xmas cake and they’d love it too.

‘Shame to mislead them like that but if an essentially English style cake makes a hit in France, then “good ol’ Ngaire” I say.

Easy Fruit Cake

1 lb (450-500 gms) mixed dried fruit
8 oz (225 gms)butter
3 eggs
1.5 cups sugar
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp each of mixed spicve and cinnamon

Prepare a 9 inch (23cm) cake baking tin.

Boil 1 lb of mixed dried fruit in enough water to cover for 15 minutes.

Drain and chop in 8 oz butter

Beat together 3 eggs and 1 1/2 cups  sugar until fluffy.

Add the egg mix to the fruit with 2 cups flour,  2 tsp Baking Powder, 1 tsp ground mixed spice and 1 tsp cinnamon.

Bake at 170C (160C fan oven) for 1.25 to 1.5 hours  (9" tin)

No 11 - Mum's Christmas Cake

Xmas Cake

Christmas cake always gets made in August or September and put away to mature for Christmas.  When I left home I got 2 recipes off my mother and will reproduce both here.  I prefer the Easy Xmas Cake recipe, but this year, for the first time, I made the Pineapple one.  I may have undercooked it slightly but it had passed the skewer test.  On cutting it at Christmas it seemed a bit more moist than I’d want a Xmas fruit cake to be.  That would be the pineapple.  It didn’t last long at work so clearly they didn’t mind moist.

I bake in a fan oven, bought new when we moved in here a couple of years ago.  However despite the expense of a top name and an A+ energy rating etc., the annoying thing doesn’t cook evenly; it burns one side and a back corner.  So I decided that no fan was going to dry my Xmas Cake out and went for top and bottom elements for an hour then bottom only for the rest of the cooking.  That might be the cause of the undercooking, but as I say, if you like your cakes moist……

Pineapple Xmas Cake

8 oz butter
8 ox brown sugar
6 eggs
12 oz flour
1 tsp mixed spice
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1 dsp glycerine
3 lb mixed fruit
1 small tin of crushed pineapple (440 grams), drained
Essences as desired

Boil the fruit and pineapple in water to cover for 10 minutes, drain, add glycerine and cool.

Prepare a 9" deep baking tin - we traditionally line the bottom and sides with heavy brown paper and make sure the paper comes well above the sides of the tin.

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time, add dry ingredients and fruit.

Level it out in the baking tin and bake for 3-3.5 hours at 165C for the first hour and then at 130C for the rest.


Easy Christmas Cake

Put 3 lb mixed dried fruit in a pot with
8 oz brown sugar,
8 oz butter,
1 Tb glycerine and
1 cup water. 
Boil 10 minutes and leave to cool.

Separate 4 eggs and beat the white and yolk separately.  Add the beaten egg components time about with

1 lb flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
2 tsp pMixed Spice

Bake in a lined 9" deep tin in a slow oven (about 130C) for 3.5 hours