Christmas Cake

Sing:"Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive Her King......"

Thank you Jesus for coming to the earth 2011 years ago to save us all!

Christmas is coming soon! The cold wintry weather has started and perhaps we will have a white Christmas this year!

This year, I am attempting to make my very first Christmas Cake with lots and lots of fruits and of course brandy!

I first got the idea of making this cake when I was flipping through my monthly subscription of deliciousmagazine. There were many, many wonderful dessert and cake recipes like the chocolate Christmas Yule Log in the December issue and it was the beautiful Christmas cake that caught my attention!

I never liked the Christmas Cakes I had many years ago back home as I found them too sweet and all they tasted of was sweet, sweet and sweet sugar. However, one of my housemates made one 8 years ago and I fell in love with Christmas Cake as it had so many wonderful flavours in it with all the different fruits soaked in brandy and the fragrant spices like cinnamon, clove and nutmeg - the wonderful taste of Christmas!

So hopefully, my very own Christmas Cake will turn out perfect and I will know in a month's time!

You can find the recipe in the December issue of deliciousmagazine.

You can also find a slightly different recipe in the Tesco Real Food Magazine.

Just by looking at the many wonderful ingredients made me want to have a taste of the Christmas Cake ASAP!

Dried Fruits

Mixing almost 1.5kg of different dried fruits with self raising flour,nuts and the spices, I thought that must make a HUGE cake! And that was before I even added the creamed butter with sugar and eggs!

Spices and Brandy

The rest of the ingredients and Self raising flour

There was so much cake mixture that I had to use a big mixing bowl and my baking tray to mix them thoroughly but it was still super fun making it!

When I finally added the brandy to the cake mixture, the aroma was so wonderful and I couldn't wait for the cake to finish baking!

Preparing Baking Tin

Making the cake mixture was the easy part, what I found tedious was preparing the baking tin!

The recipe calls for a DEEP 20cm round baking tin lined with 2 layers of baking paper then wrapped on the outside with another two layers to prevent the cake from burning.

I have two 20cm round baking tins but they were shallow ones. I put my cake mixture into both and was still left with quite a bit of the cake mixture, so I took out a loaf tin and put the rest of the mixture into it.


After 4 1/2 hours of baking at low temperatures, the cakes are ready!

The aroma of fruits and brandy filled the warm kitchen, it was absolutely wonderful!

Sneak peak

Unwrapping

Unwrapping the cake was like unwrapping Christmas presents! Such beautiful things!

Because my cakes were not made in a deep cake tin, they were not as tall as they should be, so I hope that they will be moist on the inside when we eat them in a month's time.

Two Christmas Cakes!

After the cakes were completely cooled, they were wrapped in baking paper and foil then stored in a cool, dry place.

Brandy will be poured over once a week for four weeks, and it will be just in time for Christmas!

Christmas Cake!

When the cakes are ready in a month's time, I will be decorating them with icing and Christmas trees....so watch this space!