fruit

Have Your Cake & Eat It… Just not until Christmas!

Last year I posted a blog on Stir Up Sunday with a recipe for Christmas Pudding. Click on this link ‘Christmas Pudding’ if you want to see it.

This Year I’m giving a recipe for Christmas Cake. You may think it’s a bit early but this cake tastes better for a bit of maturing. Put it this way. Last year we made two cakes. We started the second in the Summer holidays it was superb and still lovely and moist (something to do with the alcohol content me thinks!). In fact this year I’m wondering whether to do extra so we have a cake for next Christmas too!

This recipe will give a large 10″ cake and a smaller one. Or you could try two 8″ size tins. It depends on what sort of depth you want on your cake.

You can use whatever dried fruit you like in your cake. I put mainly vine fruits in mine with a little currants and angelica. If you want to push the boat out a few dried Morello cherries and cranberries make a luxurious addition.

Traditional Christmas Fruit Cake

800g Mixed dried fruit

300g nibbed almonds

200g glace cherries

100g crystalized ginger (roughly chopped)

Soak the above in 350ml of port, 350ml brandy and 1 bottle of Kreik overnight (or whatever alcohol you like)

4 medium eggs beaten

zest and juice of 2 oranges

200g melted butter

2 teaspoons of cinnamon and a good grating of nutmeg

1 teaspoon of all spice (pimento)

200g Muscavado sugar

2 tablespoons of black treacle

300g self raising flour

Method

Once your fruit has had it’s alcoholic bath simply put all the ingredients in a very big basin and give a very thorough mix.

Pre-heat the oven to 150°C/gas mark 4.

Grease and line your baking tins/moulds.

Fill your tins leaving at least 3cm gap from the top.

Bake in the oven for 2 hours 20 minutes to 2 hours 40 minutes.

If the top is browning a bit too quickly loosely cover with a little baking parchment.

Too check if the cake is done pierce the centre with a bamboo skewer. The cake is done when the skewer comes out virtually clean.

Leave the cakes to cool in the tin then take out.

Pierce the bottom of the cake with a skewer. Now you can feed your cake with whatever spirit you like! I find Brandy works the best but Whiskey also gives a great result. Simply spoon some alcohol over the cake and let it soak in. This can be repeated every 2 to 3 weeks or every week as it nears Christmas. Once the cake has had it’s first feed, wrap in greaseproof/baking paper then tin foil and then cling film. We keep ours in a cool box in a cool place.

We don’t ice our cake as we tend to enjoy it with a nice slab of vintage Cheddar and glass of wine, Port or Madeira but of course you can cover it with marzipan and icing of your choice or try glazing with some warmed apricot jam and decorating with nuts or glace fruit.

The only hard part I find about making this cake? Waiting until Christmas to eat it!

I wish I could have my cake and eat it now!

Eat What You Want… Diet?

We don’t do diets in our house. Or at least I didn’t think we did. Then I Googled ‘diets’ out of interest.

Crikey!

We have the 5:2 diet, Dukan diet, Paleo diet, Atkins diet, Alkaline diet, Cambridge diet, South Beach diet, Slimming World diet, Slim-Fast diet, LighterLife diet, WeightWatchers diet, Rosemary Conley diet and Jenny Craig diet and that’s just for starters

I then Googled ‘Eat what you want diet’. I was surprised to find page after page of differing ‘Eat What You Want Diets’!

Now I have nothing against diets. I’m sure for some people they are the right thing and possibly the only way they will lose weight.

However the people that seem to be on a never ending circle of diets do make me laugh. Because that’s the thing. They do one diet, lose some weight, start eating ‘normally’, put weight back on and then start another diet. And then there’s someone making a lot of money out of these people!
The funny thing is we eat what we want. No. Not the eat all what you want diet. We just eat what we want.

However, we hardly eat any processed food. We don’t eat ready meals… at all (even the microwave has been shut away in the loft!) and if we or the Kids want to have something to eat between meals it’s usually a piece of fruit, not a chocolate bar, bag of crisps or bag of sweets.

We saw a video that someone had posted on You tube. It was a talk by Michael Pollan. If you are interested in food and diet I recommend looking at some of the things he has written.

Michael Pollan Books

One of the things he says is “you can eat as much junk food as you want… as long as you make it yourself”

And it’s a really good train of thought. It’s easy to go and buy chips, pizza, burgers and southern fried chicken from the take-away, you could go every day. However to make these things at home requires time, effort, quite a bit of mess and subsequent cleaning up! Which is why we only have these things occasionally as a treat, even then chips are usually baked in the oven as opposed to deep-fried. Making them yourself also means you don’t get the hidden nasty ingredients in there.

The other thing that Michael Pollan mentions is the amount of sugar, salt, chemicals and hidden fats in processed foods and ready meals. Again something which we don’t really eat.

So it’s funny when you look at the different diets and see that the majority of them say to cut down on processed food and eat more fruit and vegetables.

Well that’s what we do and it’s also what Michael Pollan advocates (although I have given a very simplified version of his advice).

We enjoy food. We cook nearly everything we eat from scratch. We eat fruit. We eat vegetables.

We don’t eat ready meals and we don’t eat a lot of processed food.

We eat what we want… does that mean we’re on a diet? If we are we’ve been on it for over eight years and still enjoying it. Now that must be some diet!

Just please, please don’t give it a name… I would be mortified to Google diets again and find ‘The ‘Ome Made Diet’!

Stir-Up-Sunday…

If you haven’t already made your Christmas Puddings then Sunday the 24th of November is the time to do it, the last Sunday before the start of Advent and traditionally known as Stir Up Sunday.

Here is a fail safe recipe for a lovely moist, boozy pudding!

Ingredients

600g mixed dried fruit and nuts. I use roughly 500g of mixed dried fruits (predominately raisins, sultanas and currants with a few cranberries, sour cherries and a good handful of glace cherries). For the nuts I usually use nibbed almonds.

500ml bottle of Guinness

300ml port

100ml brandy

200g shredded suet (proper beef is best, you can use vegetarian of course)

zest of 1 orange and 1 lemon

2 medium cooking apples grated

freshly grated nutmeg

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

250g muscavado sugar

75g plain flour

3 medium eggs beaten

150g breadcrumbs

Method

Soak the fruit for at least 24 hours in the alcohol (if you don’t want to use alcohol then you could use tea and orange juice)

In a large bowl mix all the ingredients together. Get the whole family to give it a stir and make a wish at the same time (my wish is that the pudding turns out ok!)

Grease a large pudding bowl and a few smaller ones (ideal for giving away to friends, family and neighbours), pour the pudding mixture into the bowls leaving an inch from the top.

Cover the mixture with a circle of greaseproof paper. cover the bowl with tinfoil (with a pleat in it to allow for the pudding to expand) and then place in a large pan on a trivet with a folded strip of tin foil underneath to allow you to lift the pudding out. Pour water into the pan to come up 2/3 of the way up the pudding basin.

Put the pan on to boil. When boiling turn down to a simmer and cover the pan. A large pudding will take 2 1/2 to 3 hours to cook (test with a skewer, the skewer wants to come out clean). I usually take the pan off the heat but leave the pudding in the water for an hour just to make sure the pudding is evenly cooked through.

Lift the pudding out of the water and set aside to cool. Once cool I take the pudding out of the basin, wrap in greaseproof paper, then cling film and then tin foil. I then put in a spare cool box where it stays until the big day.

On the day you are eating having the pudding it can either be put back in the basin it was cooked in and boiled again for an hour to heat up or it can be microwaved in short bursts (a couple of minutes at a time leaving a minute in between).

To serve place the pudding on a heatproof plate. Pour a couple tablespoons of Brandy into a ladle and gently heat over a low flame. Once the Brandy starts to shimmer pour over the pudding and light with a match.

Remember to have a bucket of water and fire extinguisher on hand… just in case!

Merry Christmas!

P.S try slices of leftover pudding fried in butter for breakfast… Fantastic!