A Cake for Christmas, or Just For A Monday

The Farmer absolutely loves plain boiled fruit cake.  I can cook all the fancy "Gourmet Traveller" type cakes in the world and he would still just prefer fruit cake.  It is such an old fashioned cake.  Fortunately I have a strong inner-nanna and so am well able to bake one.  My recipe came from my Mum.  I think she actually got it off a packet of mixed fruit sometime in the 1970s.... She got me sometime in the 70s too, so the cake and I have this in common.

It is super easy and doubles for a Christmas cake with very little tweaking.  Sherry is my secret weapon for making anything smell and taste like Christmas...  I bought some at the local bottle shop recently and joked with the shop owner that I had had such a bad day I was going to polish the lot off.  She laughed and said I had more expensive taste than that....! I am choosing to see this as a Good Thing.

You just need these ingredients.

Cake Ingredients and Sherry

They are

• 3 cups mixed fruit (can be any type of mixed fruit, some chopped glace fruit makes it more Christmassy)
• 1 cup dark brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons of butter
• 1 teaspoon of carb soda
• 2 teaspoons of mixed spice
• 1 cup of walnuts, almonds or combination of the two
• 1 cup of water (or half a cup of water and half of sherry/whiskey etc for boozy Christmassy version)
• 1/2 cup of plain flour
• 1 and a 1/2 cups of self raising flour
• 2 eggs

It is super easy to make.  I just bring everything except the eggs and the flour to boil in a big pot.

Ingredients in pot, smelling all spicy and sherrylike

Boiling

Once it has all boiled, I just remove it from the stovetop and let it cool for 10 minutes or so.  Them mix in the flours first and then the eggs.

Cake batter

I then put it in a fully lined cake tin and bake it for about an hour.  In a moderate oven. Which I try to remember to preheat.

I decorate the top before I bake it too.  You can do what you like but I think almonds and glace cherries look good. They taste yummy too.

Finished cake

I am not very artistic.  I am sure most people could do something a bit classier with the almonds and the cherries than the above.  They could probably even centre the design properly.

So there you go - an excellent nanna-style fruitcake for Christmas.  Just don't get too excited with that sherry...