CF Christmas: my first ever homemade Christmas cake

Gulp. I’ve gone and done it, I’ve written my first Christmas post.

This year we are taking over the mantle of hosting the Christmas Day celebrations. As a family, we would rather not spend our first year without Daddy in our family home. Understandably. So, we figured by doing everything differently and somewhere new, we wouldn’t constantly be noticing all the places he should be (carving the turkey, at the head of the table etc etc) and give ourselves a fighting chance of getting through the day which, lets be honest, anyone who has lost someone they love will tell you, is all you can hope for the first year.

So, it’s the Mansi household’s responsibility to lay on the festive cheer and I intend to do so in style. First up for anyone’s first Christmas as hostess has to be the Christmas cake.

I am going with the Queen B of baking (aka Mary Berry) on the recipe front – although I have tweaked the dried fruit content to mix things up. I’ve ditched some of the vine fruits and all of the candied peel, in favour of dried blueberries and cranberries. They’ve gone into a huge mixing bowl along with glace cherries (not the neon red ones), dried apricots (non-sulphur please) and a good douse of brandy. They’re quietly getting sozzled in the utility room till tomorrow when the actually baking commences, but I thought I’d get ahead of the game and line my tin.

On this front I have garnered the opinion of three sage women (namely the mother in law, grandmother in law and best friend’s mum) all whom have made more Christmas cakes than I’ve had birthdays, and it would seem, have entirely different methods.

I have decided to go with the simplest, as this is my maiden voyage into festive baking, and have simply double lined the base of my tin (i.e. sat my tin on top of two sheets of baking parchment, drew around it, cut it out and sat it in the bottom). Then I’ve made another two that will sit on top of the cake mixture while cooking to stop it drying out. Lastly, I’ve made a collar to go inside, between the tin and the mixture, that stands 1.5inches above the height of the tin. Don’t ask me what this is for, I have no idea.

Ta dah!

So, that’s it for now. Other than costing a small fortune (I’m sure it would have been cheaper to buy one from Fortnums), it seems pretty straight forward.

Famous last words…