Thread: Christmas cake recipe?

Add rum?

Step 1 - Purchase Lions Christmas cake and rum.
Step 2 - Drink rum
Step 3 - What cake?

Some distant family done this, they soaked them up to 12 months in some sort of rum. It dosnt have to be so long but that's what they did.
Recipe? No idea it will be one of those secrets you have to squeeze out of some baker or friend of friend...
Cheers Jim


Sorry it was a pudding soaking in brandy for up to 12 months. Then they would set it on fire for a minute and caramelize the outside...

My grandmother when she was alive would make a cake and pudding in June and hang them in the pantry til December then post them over from Hobart.
They would be soaked in brandy to keep them moist and preserved, 20 years since she passed and haven't tasted anything as good since.

I've been making the Christmas cakes and pudding for the family for many years. You must remember that the practise of baking cakes and cooking puddings months in advance, then dosing them in grog, comes from the northern hemisphere where their fruit was produced months away from Christmas. The long process was the best way of preserving the stuff until it was eaten on or near Christmas day. We don't need to do that here. I've done it both ways many times, and in my opinion, a cake or pudding that is prepared and cooked within a month of eating is better simply because it's fresher. I still dose either with grog. With the pudding, which I cook in a cloth, I clean out the paste inside the top then pour some brandy it there before drying it completely, then re-tying it and hanging up.
With the cake(s), it stays in the paper liner it's cooked in, and gets wrapped in several clean tea towels for a couple of days, so it cools slowly. Then unwrapped and the top pricked with a fine skewer.(S/S mig wire) I then soak in some brandy over the next couple of weeks, a tablespoon or so at a time.
I think if you dunked a cake in grog to soak it, you'd destroy the cake. The suggestion of soaking the cake would, I imagine, amount to doing something along the lines of what I do.
Any recipe for either cake or pudding will be fine cooke near to the time and given a tipple every two or three days. just be sure to let the last lot completely soak away before adding more, or you'll wreck your work.
Don.

When I saw the title I asked Mrs Pedro about her recipe for Christmas cake and her reply was, well, negative?
something about posting a family secret on the internet for everyone in the world to see?..

I passed on your comments Don, all I got was a "look",,
aparently ours was made in September?

mum used to make her cake(s) early and would religously bring them out and "massage" brandy into them a number of times before xmas.

I remember she would boil all the contents up then mix in flour and whatever secrets went in , in a big old bowl from a bedroom/bathroom commode set.It was pretty heavy going and we'd take turns of kneading over the mix with a big old wooden spoon.

forgotten magic, my wife hasn't made a xmas cake.

Both my mother and mother-in-law swore that Christmas cakes had to be made and maturing by the end of June. Sploshed with brandy, wrapped in baking paper and tea-towels and stored in a cool dark place. More brandy added from time to time as determined by the cake witch. My m-i-l was raised strict Methodist and the Christmas cake was the only time there was ever any alcoholic beverage in her house. F-i-l got the task of going to the pub to buy the brandy as "ladies never go to hotels". After he passed away I inherited the job. In their small country town a woman's reputation would be damned if she was known to "go to hotels".

I have had some of her Christmas cake that was two years old and absolutely perfection.