The FastDay Forum

I haven't baked for years, but I've now got a list
Hubby reckons we need to get a Christmas cake started. Any good recipes peoples?

@Karenm I make the Dan Lepard caramel Christmas Cake or his Dundee Cake.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... ake-recipe

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... -bakealong

The biggest rave reviews that I've ever had for a fruit cake - and this includes the hordes of people who staunchly declare that they don't like fruit cake, never mind Christmas Cake, is for Mary Anne Boerman's Keep Cake. I'd think that an appropriate icing and it would make a grand Christmas Cake if you need a decorated one. You can try it out now but the lovely thing about Keep Cake is that you would't have to make it as a Christmas Cake until late November if you wanted and that gets round the whole storage and 'feeding' your Christmas Cake faff. (I say faff, because I make mini-cakes to give to colleagues and others, so I literally have several hundred of the blighters to store - I normally start doing them in August but we're still waiting for some home alterations to finish.)

http://timetocookonline.com/2014/03/08/keep-cake/

I've been able to borrow a stone grinder so I've been making unbelievably smooth nut butters over the weekend: peanut (in 2 ways); hazelnut plus hazelnut and chocolate (unbelievably decadent 'proper' Nutella); both blanched and roasted cashew nut butter; both blanched and roasted almond butter.

Tomorrow, I might try out some sunflower seed butters and then some mixes to see what I think.

Because the stone grinding is a relatively much colder process than running nuts through a food processor, the butter doesn't taste as oxidised as many products do. And, of course, they're just the nuts (unless I'm adding chocolate etc. later) so no fillers, extra oil, sweeteners etc. I've made some excellent truffles and fruit/nut/seed/energy bars with these butters.

Thanks@ssure, that keep cake looks good! Is it one you can feed with booze?
How do you feed a cake?

Hmm, I've never fed a keep cake with booze but I don't supposed there's any strong reason not to if people want that in a Christmas version. That said, I've never made such a popular fruit cake as is and as MA Boermans says, it's perfect for those of us with the regional tradition of eating cheese with fruit cake.

The care and feeding of Christmas Cake You have to pierce the cake with a darning needle and pour small amounts brandy/rum/whisky/whiskey or similar over it and wrap it in muslin. You repeat this several times over the months or even a year for some people (some people do it weekly but I think it wrecks the flavour of the fruit - some people don't mind that ).

http://www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/ ... -cake.html

Non-alcoholic feeding is trickier because of the risk of fermentation.

http://www.nigella.com/kitchen-queries/ ... Cakes/3038

[carieoates]

Sad but true.....my family don't like cake. We struggle to finish birthday cakes, they just don't eat them.
So, my mum always makes me either half a Christmas cake (drunk) or I share one with my inlaws then there's less icing and marzipan on.

Lots of fruit cake are wretched. The fruit is dry or gloopy with added sugar, the cake batter is disappointing, and I can't bear icing or most marzipan.

That said, I can not recommend MA Boerman's Keep Cake highly enough - I bake a lot for people and I've never had so many texts enthusing about anything else as I have that cake. It is solid pieces of fruit and enough batter to hold it together - it's like a British panforte if you like that (and, I do).

I should also say, and I'm somewhat embarrassed about this, that it took me a long time to learn that most marzipan that's sold in the UK shouldn't be fed to us. It's a scant amount of almonds and usually horribly oxidised - proper marzipan or stuff you make yourself doesn't even appear to be related to the neon food product that's been masquerading under that name.

Lemon and pistachio marzipan is astonishing when you're only used to the run of the mill stuff: very refreshing and a lovely sharpish contrast to a rich fruit cake (or, even by itself - don't ask me how I know - I never thought I'd ever be happy to eat marzipan by itself but that's obviously why some countries enthuse about marzipan sweets as such a delicacy.)

ETA: I'm planning on making several marzipans this week to try them out - it's one of the reasons that I borrowed the stone grinder.

@ssure do you have a recipe I could use to make marzipan without the grinder?
I am totally keyed up for this whole Christmas cake thing! Hubby wants us to make a practice one today! May have to wait a couple of days though as I really, truly have too much to do to be wasting all my time here
I have NEVER in my life been online looking at recipes at stupid o'clock in the morning like I did today
Thankyou for inspiring me to bake again. So many years on so many diets stopped all of the baking. I just wish I knew where I could find the coconut macaroon cake I used to make when the girls were little!x

@ssure do you have a recipe I could use to make marzipan without the grinder?

@Karenm, Marzipan is like nut butter, you can make it in a coffee grinder or food processor as long as you don't mind stopping and starting the machine to let it cool down (and as long as you're not curious about the effect of the temperature).

Delia's almond marzipan recipe is reliably good and if you use pre-ground almonds you don't even need a grinder/processor.

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/cuis ... icing.html

Ruby Tandoh has a decent pistachio marzipan recipe - tho' it's the same for the normal almond marzipan if you're using whole almonds.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... len-recipe

I make a LOT of fruit cake and I have converted many a hater. As you say, sadly there is a lot of bad fruit cake out there and it has ruined the perception of the stuff for many people. I will definitely give your keep cake a go as I love experimenting. It has to be said that although I regularly try new recipes, I constantly return to a couple of favourites, quite different to each other. One uses the simmered fruit technique, whiskey and Drambuie. The other requires that the fruit be steeped in the alcohol for at least three days. Mine usually steeps for over a week and has been known to steep for months - it just needs a good stir now and again.

@ssure I have a keep cake just in the oven
I have never made a fruit cake before, mainly because I didn't really like it. At weddings etc, I'd ask for a corner piece so there was more marzipan and icing! My tastes have changed a bit, so I've got high hopes for this cake. It's got no booze in it though!
@winsome have you got links to your boozy recipes please?
I wish I'd not bothered buying the roulade now

@ssure I have a keep cake just in the oven
I have never made a fruit cake before, mainly because I didn't really like it. :

I hope that you like it as much as my neighbours, family, friends, colleagues, sports chums etc.

Which fruits did you use, @Karenm?

Sis' made Vietnamese Beef Pho from scratch yesterday. starting with the boiling of the oxtail as the start of an aromatic beef stock, the key to the flavour in this dish

So good. roughly same as this recipe .. and also made in pressure cooker
http://www.dadcooksdinner.com/2011/01/p ... -beef.html

so good

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Made roasted brazil nut butter and coconut butter in the stone grinder. They're both good. The brazil nut butter doesn't seem at all on the point of rancid (which I sometimes seem to pick up in other nut butters). I only made the coconut butter because I was out of it and I realised that I had a pack of coconut that was nearing its BB date so might as well use it in a ground butter experiment.

One thing about a stone grinder is that it does make the butters very liquid and homogenous - for chunkier butters or ones that are approximately set at ambient room temperature, I don't know if I would be looking at one of the grinders with variable speed control or if I should grind down a quantity, remove some of the chunkier butter and then stir back into the smooth butter later to see if it sets.

Just mentioning this because I used the brazil nut butter and coconut butter to make a fudge but it hasn't set up at all at ambient temperature and will need to be kept in the fridge to be at all solid. Tho', in its semi-solid form, the fudge is a good cookie filling.

I know the fudge is a good cookie filling because I baked brazil nut cookies (a recipe link posted by @Juliana.Rivers) and it pairs well with that.

An additional fruit cake suggestion for those who, like my family, pair it with cheese. I strongly recommend Konditor and Cook's Figgy Fruit Loaf from the book, Deservedly Legendary Baking. I put it away to mature (as recommended) and we finally sliced into one over the weekend. Like Mary Ann Boerman's Keep Cake, it is, indeed, excellent with cheese and would make a fine addition to any cheeseboard or upcoming Winter social events.

I've also just finished baking a batch of MA Boerman's Seed Crunchies

http://timetocookonline.com/2014/06/18/seed-crunchies/

I re-scaled the recipe to 100g of sugar to 100g of egg whites and obtained 50 crunchies - so at 2g of sugar apiece, it's not a particularly sweet recipe and allowable even within an overall limit of 20g of added sugar a day. It is a good, tasty crunch with nicely contrasting textures and feels far more indulgent than its ingredients would justify. Next time I make it, I might experiment with toasting some of the nuts first.

ETA: the crunchies count as 'from scratch' because they were our own sunflower seeds

I ground some sesame seeds for tahini because I wanted to make a tahini sauce. My first version was horribly bitter and I had to assume that it was because hulled sesame seeds seem to go rancid at a rate of knots.

I started reading up about it, however, and it seems it's a bit more complicated than that. It is true that hulled sesame seeds go rancid very quickly (even more than most nuts and seeds, they benefit from being kept in the freezer but - good luck finding out how long the seeds have been stored before you bought them) but it also seems that the variety of sesame seed matters.

According to Hummus Bros: Levantine Kitchen, good tahini is made with:

'Humera' sesame seeds, usually grown in Ethiopia, and sometimes Paraguay. Some inferior tahini is made from Nigerian seeds, but we only buy tahini with Humera seeds for our restaurant...

The ultimate test for tahini is to taste it pure, without any addition of water. If there is an aftertaste (which is usually bitter), then this will certainly come out in the taste of the finished hummus. When you have high quality tahini made from the rights seeds there is no aftertaste and the consistency is almost quicksand like, which sticks to the top of your mouth. If you can easily eat a spoonful of raw tahini that means it's not good enough.

I've no idea how accurate this opinion is but it has set off one of my usual rants which is that packaging in the UK rarely informs you when something was harvested rather than when it was packed. My package label has a section for 'Country of Origin' but no country was identified.

Sometimes, I think we dislike nuts because they're dry or rancid because, unbeknownst to us, they were harvested up to two years previously rather than in the past few months. My tahini is a lot more bitter than I like - I've no idea if it's my technique at fault (tho' I don't see how, it's just grinding), the storage of the sesame seeds en route to my purchase of them, or the seed variety.

Unless nuts and seeds are purchased unhulled and with a harvest date then I don't know how else we can have any confidence in their freshness. It would add enormously to the cost of purchasing them if they had to have a verified cold chain or to be sold refrigerated/frozen but this present hit and miss system is far from satisfactory.

I often wonder how rancid some of the food that we regularly consume is - oils, nuts/seeds etc. and why it doesn't seem to be possible to agree on packaging that isn't open to abuse but does protect contents properly. Clear bottles/packets don't seem at all sensible for oils/nuts/seeds etc.

[/Rant] As you were.

NB: it's probably obvious that I feel strongly about this subject. It's particularly more so because my sense of smell and taste were impaired after an accident and they've not fully recovered so I can't rely on smell to detect that something is 'turning' or rancid.