Today you won’t need too many more ingredients, but you will want to have some parchment paper and some brown paper around. I just use a paper grocery bag. Because someone will ask, I haven’t left anything out of the ingredients of this cake. It’s a very old recipe. The only thing it uses for leavening is the eggs. So be gentle with it while it’s baking.
Christmas Cake Stage Two: Baking the Cake
Ingredients
- 280g (10 oz) butter
- 225g soft brown sugar
- 5 eggs
- 255 g (9 oz) all-purpose flour
- 85 g (3 oz) almond flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
Directions
- Prep the baking pan. (see how below)
- Now you may take out the top rack of your oven and preheat your oven to 300 degrees.
- Mix the softened butter together with the sugar until it turns that nice pale color.
- Add the eggs one at a time. To be sure your batter doesn’t curdle, add a tablespoon of the flour with each egg.
- Mix the rest of the flour and almond flour together with the salt.
- Fold the flour mixture into your creamed mixture.
- When the flour is fully incorporated you can fold in the soaked fruit. That’s a lot of folding. You will probably find yourself singing “around the outside through the middle” before you are done.
- When the fruit is fully incorporated, you can pour the mixture in your paper lined pan and smooth it out like in the picture below.
- Put this in the oven, close the oven door and do not open it for 3.5 hours.
- When your timer goes off you can test the cake and if the tester comes out dry, the cake is done. Take it out of the oven, but let it cool overnight before removing it from the pan.
To prep the pan: I use a 9 inch springform pan which is a lovely modern invention, but even though they are a little deeper, you still have to do the papering:
First you are going to butter the bottom of your pan and use that to tack down a circle of parchment paper.
Then you are going to cut a rectangle of brown paper and tie it around the outside of the pan, so that it sticks above the pan at least ten inches.
Now, you are going to cut a rectangle of parchment paper and line the sides of the pan. Some recipes will tell you to just let the inner parchment paper to go a little beyond the edge of the cake tin. I prefer to just make them the same height, so that I don’t acidentally dump cake between the two paper layers.
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