CAKETIME!

As previously reported in a couple of blog posts last year, we (that is, the Us) do quite a bit for Christmas. It is an important feast (in both senses of the word) in the calendar. This year, we are sticking with the Stick It To The Jews theme and will continuing to feast upon the meat of a pig. To wit, roasted pork with crackling and some kind of roasted potatoes. Down with the Levitican dietary laws!

In addition to this, we shall be feasting upon a cake containing raisins (although this is NOT some reference to the idiocy of the Temperance Movement and their idiotic translation of the Wedding at Cana - we are just having a cake, which contains raisins). To wit, a traditional fruit cake, made from this recipe. We are, of course, changing the recipe to incorporate the Michigan cherries, miss out the candied peel and so forth - but the central thrust of the cake is the same as Auntie's old standby. And that is merely the first of many sexual inuendos we intended to make (and did make) while whipping up a nice stiff batter.

Fnar-fnar.

Alright, what are you looking at? The first stage in the making of the cake is to gather the dried fruit. We stood in the fruit aisle of the local supermarket and searched for the various kinds of fruit we needed, but were hampered by the Americaness of the locale and the presence of glace cherries and candied peel in the recipe. Seriously, people - those things look like someone ate a Faberge egg in a drunken stupor and threw it up. Let's not go there. Also, those cherries? Make honey red. Not good.

So, what we did was work out how much fruit we needed (about 3lbs) and then just buy roughly the right kinds of fruit up to that weight. We chopped the big fruit up small and threw it all into a large glass bowl and then covered it liberally in brandy.

Alright; for those of you unaware of this - in an effort to control binge drinking, public intoxication, the USA (the fine nation that brought you Prohibition) sets minimum prices on liquor. Yeah, weird, huh? So, what you see as you drive around are large signs reading "LIQUOR STORE - LOWEST PRICES ALLOWED BY STATE LAW". It's awesome - "Get drunk for cheap, you wino!" is the central message here, I feel.

Anyway, we went to one of those placed and purchased brandy. Now, I wanted (so the wino image would be complete) to get brandy in a plastic bottle, but alas! It was not to be. The only brandies which were in plastic bottles were the flavored ones, and those (we felt) would make the cake suck serious amounts of ass. So, instead, we purchased brandy in a glass bottle. Fear not, this is still perhaps the worst brandy Liza has ever tasted. It is a filthy, raw spirit most suitable for degreasing engines. Still, we used it to soak the fruit.

Witness the first significant departure from the recipe as written here. The recipe suggests about 150ml of brandy, which is diddle. It also suggests letting is soak overnight, which is gay as chips, okay? We used about two thirds of a bottle and let it soak for a couple of days. What this does is plump the fruit up really nicely and give it a good flava. If you don't do this (and use too little and not long enough - fnar-fnar) you end up with little hard nubs (fnar-fnar) of fruit (fnar-fnar) in your moist cake (you get the idea - this is kind of deliberate).

So, fruit is left to soak. We go to the Vorisopolis and watch ID4 and Megashark vs Giant Octopus with Housecat while eating chicken and chilli (two days, there - not one day of gluttony and sci-fi B-movies).

A couple of days later, once we have recovered from chilli and Debbie Gibson, we undertake to actually bake this thing. Now, as all men of learning know, you can't just slam cake in a pan in the oven and expect it to work. What you have to do is prepare the pan.

Above you see a 10 inch cake pan lined with a double thickness of greaseproof paper on the bottom and the sides. This is a crazy level of preparation for a cake - most cakes just use a non-stick pan or a single layer of paper. Not this cake. Lest we forget, there is 3 lbs of fruit in here and most of a bottle of brandy. Serious preparations are required. AND! The papery-prep ain't done yet - this is just stage one. I did this arts-and-crafts bit while Liza . . .

Liza gets on with the actual cooking. The cake batter begins life in the "creamed butter and sugar" family. So, she heated the butter (which was frozen, oops!) in the microwave and weighed out the sugar. The recipe calls for that soft, sticky, dark brown muscavado (isn't that a duck?) sugar but we didn't have any of that. Meh, whatevs. We slapped down some regular brown sugar (hey, Father Paul!) and put in a generous dollop of molasses in there. Job done.

Now Liza uses the electric whisk (thank you, Mr Edison) to whisk (does what it says on the tin) the sugar and butter together. Liza does this while hiding from the camera because, well, she is Liza and she does that. I don't question her. I just take photographs while she is not looking.

While she is doing that, I bust out the newspaper and the butcher's string. Yeah, I know. Is this a cake of a papier mache model of a pig? Could be either, I guess. Anyway, the instruction say to wrap the outside of the tin in a folded layer of newspaper and put a pad of newspaper under the tin on top of a baking sheet. I suppose this is to provide some sort of insulation so the outside of the cake does not burn? With a cake this size, there is a very real danger of the edges burning before the inside is done.

Whatever the reason, I deem it worthwhile to follow this step. I muck about with some newspaper (back when this recipe was written, I am certain newsprint was very different and did not have all these color supplements with their glossy paper etc. in - I had to shift through all that and pull it out) and string and eventually manage to get all this together. It's harder than it looks, to do this with only two hands and a wife who is creaming butter and eggs. I managed to get it done with the assistance of some paperclips (non plastic coated, because that would be really bad in a hot oven).

Stage whatever we are up to now. We have creamed sugar and fat, and the eggs get beaten into it. Then, the fruit is added. This is a LOT of fruit, and Liza is quite feeb and pune. So, it's hard on her shoulders. Still, she insists on going this part while I man the camera. Note that no flour has gone in yet - crazy, no, for a cake? So we basically have a very sweet fruit omelette batter here. I resist the temptation to bust out the skillet (or "frying pan" as the Brits call it) and make me some breakfast.

Seriously; the Yanks would totally eat a sweetened fruit omelette for breakfast. Probably with maple sausage and whipped cream. And then they would have coffee and make the world safe for democracy.

You see why I came here? It's badass awesome.

Alright, we are just festive as all Hell. Just look at that. What is in the bowl is the batter mix with about a quarter of the flour sprinkled on top. You have to mix the flour in at this point in the recipe, and that is kind of hard to do. You can't just dump it all in because the batter is, frankly, like some kind of construction material right about now. It's like cement and weighs about as much.

So, what I did (Liza had given up on stiring the batter by this point) was just sprinkle the top of the batter with flour and fold it in. And doesn't it look festive? It looks like some kind of snowy landscape. Seriously - here is a close up of the batter in the bowl.

That looks totally like some kind of Christmas landscape.

Here I am doing the mixing of the flour into the batter so as to make a cake of some kind. This was the second or third load of flour, I think - there was very little flour for a cake of this size (which, lest we forget, is freaking huge).

Alright, the batter is fully mixed and here is me putting it into the pan. What is not shown is me sliding the bowl of batter off the countertop to take it over to the pan and nearly dropping it because it weighs a ton and a half. Seriously, this is one heavy cake and I was really not expecting it.

The batter is so dense and heavy and sticky you can't really pour it in, and if you shove it around it dislodges the greaseproof paper. So, I had to just drop lumps of it into the tin and let them find their own level under their own, enormous, weight. Eventually, there was enough in there to hold the greaseproof paper in place and I could smooth it out.

I don't have pictures of the next stage, which was to put it in the over at 300 degrees F and wait for three hours. It is a really long, slow cooking process but - at the end of it - the cake was perfectly done (cocktail stick stuck in it came out clean) and an incredibly dense, solid mass. Following the instructions, I left it to cool in the pan overnight - but not before poking a few holes in the top and pouring some brandy onto it. This heated and and vaporized almost immediately, but some soaked in.

The next morning (today!) I took it out of the pan and examined it - it is totally badass. Again, no pictures at the moment because I was hurrying. Will get some tonight when I unwrap it from the greaseproof paper and foil it is wrapped in and "feed" it more brandy. I poked some holes in it this morning and drizzled a bit of brandy onto it, and will be repeating this process until either a) the cake disolves into a sticky mess or b) there is no brandy left.

Yay! Christmas!