The Perfect Christmas Cake
I love a real Christmas cake, a dark fruit cake, slightly too soft, a little booze, and disproportionately more marzipan than strictly necessary. This year I decided to to follow the very excellent Completely Perfect by Felicity Cloake.
You will need
A tonne of ingredients. Buy The Cloake’s excellent book and you can find the recipe on the Guardian site.
The good news is that lots of the ingredients you won’t need all of the bag and now you’re a cupboard full of delicious snacks and the ingredients for things like /blog/2020-01-05-christmas-dried-fruit-tarte-tatin/
Use a decent bottle of booze. I picked up a bottle of Cardhu Gold Reserve Single Malt when it was on offer and even though I used a good cup full on the cake, regret nothing.
Do
Give yourself plenty of time. The cake will improve with age. I started in mid November, which was too late really.
Don’t cut the fruit too small, especially the figs.
Use a good jam under the marzipan. I used apricot.
Result
Moist (I should have given it another 5 minutes in the oven), rich, sticky in places and with the odd crunch from the almonds (I had my doubts, but they were great.) It’ll keep for months, but I imagine we’ll have finished outs by February.
