Hello Hello mid-january
And welcome back to this merry mini series: A Guide to the Ultimate Crustmas.
Assuming you’ve read and digested Part One: Dinner, today I give you Part Two: Cake (how to make the perfect Christmas cake and, in doing so, enact a comforting family ritual that will help you cope with the passing of time). Next in line is Part Three: Party (how to throw the best New Year’s Party on a budget) and then we’re back to our usual programing…
On that note, following on from Dolly’s gorgeous newsletter before Christmas that marked the start of the Greedy Friends column, Greedy Friends please get in touch with your ideas!
Part Two: Cake
I found myself back home home for most of this December past.
Big breath of fresh air to be out of London -
Winter in London can feel a bit weird to me - a bit end of term-y, and like everyone is anticipating that everyone else is about to jump ship and you don’t want to end up like Harry stuck at Hogwarts all alone on Christmas day.
I jumped ship early. Went home and it felt proper wintery. It really gets dark early and you really can get stuck in it. Nice to have moments in the woods as the light goes down knowing I’m the only person in there apart from that rustling; or stomping fast and talking loudly and breathlessly with a friend through the trees, chasing the light, getting to the car just as the grey turns to black.
Winter at home has its own weirdness: namely the total collapse of time. I could be seventeen, fourteen, twenty two, any of my previous ages. I am in the kitchen decorating Christmas cakes with Mum. I am concentrating on the icing, dipping the metal spatula into a cup of boiling water and running it over the top so it all becomes smooth and shiny. Or, ‘shall we make this one a snowy one?’ and roughening it up with our fingers.
There are many times throughout the year that people say to me, about my Mum, ‘How does she do it all?’. And it happens a lot at Christmas. Whilst none of the other aspects of her busy life slow down, she finds time to make and decorate an immense number of Christmas cakes and deliver them round to friends and family. One for Uncle Charlie, one for Suzie, one for the Apples… This year there were eight: a record was twelve.
The process begins in the second week of November with fruit soaking. A hillock of currants, raisins, sultanas, glacier cherries, orange rind and figs are all scooped out of from giant Costco bags into our giant bowl that is only brought out for this purpose. This year we actually used a plastic bucket. I don’t know why.
The core recipe comes from Mary Berry’s suitably old fashioned Complete Aga Cookbook (we don’t have an Aga but this is the recipe we use): over the years our own version has evolved- different fruits have been added and taken away. Dad is called in to theatrically pour over the alcohol - sherry and port and whatever he feels like. Then the fruit sits in the back of the kitchen for the month getting sticky and boozy.
Weeks later, we come back to the book to make the mix.
I love Mary Berry’s ingredients table that feels so old-fashioned. She’s pre-empted the maths necessary for Mum to make so many cakes in so many different sized tins.
I remember being responsibile for reading the measurements aloud as she weighed ingredients into a bowl. Slowly, seriously, I trace my finger along the line. I double, triple check I haven’t wobbled.
I love that this is the only time of year that I use certain ingredients, like glacier cherries or treacle.
I am affronted by black treacle. It looks sweet and sticky like golden syrup but it’s also dark black and sludgy like tar. I feel it might be a mistake to sneak a lick of it when Mum’s not looking… It feels like a witch’s trap - like something right out of a fairytale.
Nowadays I’m rarely around for the first two stages of the Christmas cake process. Mum used to make everyone in the family have a stir of the mix for good luck - she’d halt teenage us as we were heading out the door - ‘Stop - have you stirred it yet?!’… But I’ve not yet missed a year of decorating.
I was an obsessive baker in my early teens/ childhood so there is an embarrassingly well labelled and organised drawer in the kitchen full of baking things that is still referred to as my drawer. We collect and save bits for the Christmas cakes in there and do something different on each one.
We make royal icing and get going and become focused; Mum tells me to plan before I ice and stop rushing; I tell her to add more shimmer spray (one of our all time favourite tools; we like taking it seriously but also like it when it goes a bit wrong; before I know it time has collapsed into one.
This year Mum had a great little snowman she’d found somewhere and a vision for making him walk through candyfloss mist like he The Snowman ‘walking through the air’. Unsurprisingly, and not for want of trying, we couldn’t find anywhere selling candyfloss in December. However, we had a moment of inspiration at the sweets aisle in Morrisons when we saw Fox’s glacier mints and that was how the igloo came to be…!
I’ve put a few more pictures below of some of our cakes over the years…. Enjoy!