Well me and Girl Lacer have just iced the Christmas cake. Decorations weren’t fantastic this year, I had planned a retro scheme in honour of my fond memories of my granny’s Christmas cakes when I was little, although of course then plastic Santas weren’t actually retro. However I left it too late to buy the decorations and after a fruitless search had to send Mr. and Girl Lacer who were on a shopping trip back to the only shop I’d seen them in which I’d initially not been that impressed with but when realising they were indeed the only shop, well they had to do. So leaving them to decide on the decorations meant an assorted bunch of sugar christmas puddings, pink silver balls and an angel with a Merry Christmas.
Now I made the Christmas cake following Nigella’s traditional recipe from How to Be a Domestic Goddess and Feast, it was the first time I had followed this recipe and I have to admit when I got it out of the oven over a month ago or so I was a little worried about its colour. You see to me Christmas cakes are distinguished from plain old normal fruit cakes because they’re darker and denser, just from the top of the cake I could see it wasn’t particularly either of those two features but I stowed it aways as planned, got it out today, it hadn’t miraculously changed colour but this had to be my Christmas cake now and me and Girl Lacer iced it and put our tacky decorations on and then of course we had to try it (I was so curious about the colour inside the cake). Cutting into it required a bit of effort as it’s a dense old cake and it turned out to be just the same as the outside of the cake, distinctly fruit cake not christmas cake. Taste wise, a little dry and only vaguely alcoholic but quite rich, one small slice was definitely enough. I was a bit worried cutting into the Christmas cake this early there’d be none left by Christmas, but to be honest now I think come New Year I’ll be chucking a good half of it in the bin and I made a small cake! Mr. Lacer just doesn’t like Christmas cake, Girl Lacer tried some (it’s honestly so not alcoholic I was happy to give it to my 4 year old) but wasn’t impressed and Boy Lacer didn’t want to know.
Last year I made Nigella’s Easy Action Christmas Cake and it was a lot nicer, darker, more moist and so rich one slice felt like a three course meal, so in a house of non Christmas cake eaters it was a bit much (I ended up giving it to the mother-in-law). So I think next year I’ll be on the hunt for a new Christmas cake recipe and possibly blasphemy of blasphemies, not a Nigella one.
PS Sorry for the slightly dodgy photo, I’ve lost the card for my digital camera and although my new digital video camera takes photos to, as you can see they’re not that good!
