This isn’t a venture I would say went particular smoothly the whole way through, but it is a venture that became an eventual success! For Christmas Day I decided a while back that I wanted to bake and decorate a Christmas Cake for the occasion. I was not warned how flipping difficult it can actually be to do this, but now it’s all complete I’m really glad I did!
A traditional Christmas Cake is an alcohol-laced fruit cake covered with first a layer of marzipan and then a layer of icing. I had a great vision in my head of decorating it with little icing snowmen, of which you will see the result towards the end of this post.
The recipe I used was this one from BBC Good Food
Admittedly, I did have some trouble with the baking. The oven time for a Christmas Cake can be up to about two and a half hours. So, having never baked one before, I chucked it in the oven, stuck a timer on and looked back two hours later. It was fairly burnt. After umming and ahhing about whether we could just trim off the burnt bits, I decided I would just try it again and start from scratch.
I got more ingredients to replace the first batch and remade the cake mixture. This time around I kept opening the oven door to check that it wasn’t burning, which meant I was letting heat out each time and then it ended up taking aaaages to bake. But in the end it was finally done – and it turned out great!
I think it was about the beginning of November when I baked the cake and then I had to pour alcohol over it once a week. At the weekend I was icing and decorating which was both equal parts fun and hilarious. My snowmen figures do sort of look like something from outer space, but I kind of love them and on the whole I think the cake turned out pretty well.
I’ll be trying it with a cup of tea in my huge Santa mug so I’m hoping it tastes great too. Hopefully, if I bake one every year I can make them better and better each time until I am a Christmas Cake baking pro! Watch this space!
Rolling out the Marzipan layer
Kneading the icing to soften it
Starting to make the little Snowmen
And that’s the finished cake! I hope you enjoyed this blog post about baking a Christmas Cake. Let me know if you’ve ever attempted it or what you’ve been baking for Christmas this year!
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!
