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