As mentioned in my previous blog post, I love Christmas food. A traditional Christmas cake is no exception. I made them in 2008 and 2009, but not last year because we moved to Bristol in November. You have to make your cake in October, then feed with brandy before the marzipan and icing layers and I was a bit stuck for time.
I stuck to my trusty Mary Berry celebration cake recipe, which certainly didn't let me down. I also made a zesty orange marzipan layer, which adds a different taste and texture to the finished cake.
I haven't iced a cake for a couple of years and the last one I did (a birthday cake) didn't go so well, so I was a little apprehensive about trying again. At first, I thought buying the ready rolled icing would be helpful and take some of the stress out of the process. That was a bad move. As I was unrolling the icing, it cracked and was unusable in that state. I kneaded and re-rolled it, but just couldn't get it right. After a quick dash to Co-op to purchase some ready-to-roll icing, it took twenty minutes to ice the cake and smooth it out. Twenty minutes! I'm never bothering with ready rolled icing again, that's for sure. And I think it's the best job I've done of icing a cake. No creases or major bumps on the sides and I managed to get quite a sharp edge after smoothing.
The next stage was the decoration. I've never put much thought into the decoration of my Christmas cakes in the past, prefering to use ribbon or plastic decorations, but I fancied a change this year. I took inspiration from the Pink Whisk blog and her Stars and Sparkle Christmas cake. I chose red instead of the blue because....well, I just love red. It was pretty fiddly and time consuming, but looks really effective. It tasted ok too. Not as boozy as the previous one I made, but that's probably because I've been distracted with other things in the lead up to Christmas.
0 comments:
Post a Comment