My first Christmas Cake-Part 1

This is the first time I´ve ever made a Christmas Cake so I stuck completely to Hannah Miles recipe from her book Big Book of Cakes and Cookies so therefore I haven´t included the recipe on this blog post. Usually the dried fruit in the Christmas Cake is soaked in brandy but in Hannah´s recipe, amaretto (which I absolutely love) is used instead. The smell of the fruit the following morning was heavenly, both Christmassy and almondy at the same time!

Many of the ingredients Mum had brought over from England for me but I had overlooked a couple of the ingredients such as mixed spice and self-raising flour so I had to make my own. I just used normal flour and added about a 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder. I found the following mixed spice recipe on the BBC Good Food website, which I used to make up my own mixed spice (I had to leave out the mace as I didn´t have this spice and it´s not a spice that´s easy to find in Spain but it hopefully shouldn´t make too much of a difference).

After cooking the cake for 2 1/2 hrs, I let it cool, then wrapped it in baking paper and tin foil. It think it looks quite good, don´t you? I thought it was burning so turned the oven down a little but Christmas Cake usually has quite a dark colour. Every week I need to pour Amaretto over it to keep it moist and then nearer to Christmas, I´ll get down to decorating it.