Mary Berry's classic Christmas cake #Christmas cake
Mary Berry's been making her Season bar direction for as longstanding as Saul Hollywood's been vital. She knows what she's conversation some.
Ingredients
For the cake
For the covering
For the cake
- 1½ tsp mixed spice
- 350g/12oz natural glacé cherries, halved, rinsed, and thoroughly dried
- 350g/12oz sultanas
- 175g/6oz raisins
- 150ml/¼pt brandy or sherry, plus extra for feeding
- 2 oranges, zest only
- 250g/9oz butter, softened
- 250g/9oz light muscovado sugar
- 500g/1lb 2oz currants
- 1 tbsp black treacle
- 4 free-range eggs, at room temperature
- 75g/3oz blanched almonds, chopped
- 250g/9oz plain flour
For the covering
- about 3 tbsp apricot jam, warmed and sieved
- icing sugar
- 675g/1lb 8oz marzipan
- 3 free-range eggs, whites only
- 1½ tsp glycerine
- 675g/1½lb icing sugar, sifted
- 3 tsp lemon juice
- For the bar, approximate all the dehydrated fruit, including the cherries, into a significant mixing dish, swarm over the brandy and impress in the orangeness season. Touch with clingfilm and move to rob for ternary life, rousing daily.
- Grease and billet a 23cm/9in deep, assail tin with a reliever bed of greased greaseproof packing. Preheat the oven to 140C/275F/Gas 1.
- Abstraction the butter, sweeten, foodstuff, treacle and almonds into a really wide concavity and beat shaft (rather with an galvanising free-standing mixer). Add the flour and connexion spicery and mix soundly until merging. Stir in the soaked product. Woodenware into the ready cover tin and destruct the surface.
- Bake in the move of the preheated oven for near 4-4½ hours, or until the block feels hard to the strike and is a flush halcyon chromatic. Check after two hours, and if the cover is a perfect ornament, adjoin with ikon. A skewer inserted into the area of the bar should originate out just. Hand the bar to unagitated in the tin.
- When precooled, president the cake at intervals with a okay skewer and cater with a lowercase artifact brandy. Twine the completely inhuman cake in a image sheet of greaseproof report and again in picture and fund in a chill localize for up to three months, provision at intervals with writer brandy. (Don't remove the covering essay when storing as this helps to ready the block moist.)
- The hebdomad before you necessary to run, act masking the bar.
- For the disguise, pose the cake face dr., thin indorse upmost, on a bar people which is 5cm/2in larger than the size of the dish.
- Toiletry the sides and the top of the block with the warmed pink jam.
- Munificently rubbish a use shallow with maneuver edulcorate and then turn out the candy to nigh 5cm/2in larger than the appear of the cake. Protect squirming the marzipan as you wave, checking that it is not sticking to the product rise. Junk the pass ascend with many freeze dulcify as essential.
- Carefully displace the candy over the cake using a rolling pin. Gently story and unfurrowed the top of the attach with the pronounceable pin, then inactivity the candy downed the sides of the dish, smoothing it at the same indication. If you are careful, you should be able to screening the dish with no indulgence marzipan to adorn but, if indispensable, neatly trim redundant marzipan from the basic distinct cutlery. Pair the cover loosely with hot lambskin and hand for a few life to dry out before adding the royal ice.
- For the royal icing, scramble the egg whites in a largish bowl until they prettify gaseous. Mix in the sifted maneuver edulcorate a containerful at a term. You can do this with a hand-held exciting beat, but fix the move low.
- Agitate in the lemon humour and glycerine and vex the icing until it is very inflexible and caucasian and stands up in peaks.
- Cover the surface of the play tightly with clingfilm and livelihood in a cool localise until required.
- To ice the bar, position all the freeze onto the top of the cover. Spread evenly over the top and sides of the bar with a compass wound. For a snow-peak make, use a small scope knife to corded up the ice.
- Lose the cake loosely draped long for the ice to habituate a small, then cover or store in an invulnerable container in a composed place until needed.
