Helen’s Christmas Cake (the real recipe!)
I had never made a Christmas Cake until around 15 years ago. I had watched my mother making them every year and every year there was always the same sense of panic – is it cooked enough, is it cooked too much, or just maybe, is it cooked just right?
A hot cake would be taken from the oven, cooled a little and then a very small square taken from right in the middle to work out where on the above scale of “crookedness” it fell. I can’t really remember what would happen after it was assessed but I can imagine it was more time in the oven, or more brandy poured over it as needed.
It also seemed to be quite a complicated process to cook a Christmas cake, time consuming as well as the stress involved over how it turned out.
Needless to say, when it came time to cook my first Christmas Cake a similar level of stress started to build up. In this case it was made even more so because it was taking over from my mother-in-law.
All my husband ever wanted from his mother for Christmas was one of her Christmas Cakes and this was a ritual that had happened for years. He would hardly ever eat anyone else’s cake, including my mothers, his mother’s was the one he loved and he would enjoy it piece by piece through Christmas and into the new year.
Around 15 years ago she announced she would no longer be making her annual Christmas cake, she was retiring from the tradition. The request made was to then pass the recipe to me so that I could take over – handing the reins to the next generation – and with it the stress of getting it cooked just right – or so I thought.
Once the fruit had soaked in brandy for a suitable amount of time, the recipe didn’t seem too difficult. The hardest and most time-consuming part was the lining of the cake tin. Slow and steady with plenty of padding is the rule with Christmas cakes. I use old cereal boxes (a couple of layers) and a section of the newspaper (half a dozen pieces thick) and then finally grease proof paper.
The cake mix is finally poured into the middle of all these layers and heads off to slowly bake for 3 hours. No fan, just good old “Bake” setting.
As soon as those 3 hours are up and the timer goes off, I poke quite a few holes right across the cake with a cake skewer and then pour brandy across it – the sizzle and the aroma are quite intoxicating, my favourite part of baking it. The oven door closes again, and it sits slowly cooling overnight.
Then when I can’t keep Wayne from nagging about when he can eat his cake it needs to be iced. Jam brushed on, marzipan icing rolled thinly and applied, and the finishing touch is brandy butter icing.
Well, the first year I made it I cut off the first slices for him, worrying about just how moist it would be and whether it was cooked just right but I certainly didn’t expect the response I got to the first bite.
“THIS ISN’T MY MOTHERS CHRISTMAS CAKE!!”
I’d been given the recipe from her, I’d followed it to the letter, no mention of how well it was cooked – just that it wasn’t the same cake he got from her every year. I was mortified and I can’t remember if he even ate that one.
A phone call to his mother saying that the cake was nothing like hers got the following reply – “Well, I wouldn’t give her MY recipe!!” I was sabotaged, my first ever time I cooked a Christmas Cake came with so much pressure that I couldn’t believe this had happened.
This was quickly followed by giving me “her” Christmas Cake recipe. It is written into my recipe cookbook with the title – Helen’s Christmas Cake (the real recipe!).
