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English Christmas Cake
(It is the best I have ever met. And everybody who has ever eaten the cake thinks it splendid.) ¾ pound butter 1 pound brown sugar 2 pounds currants 2 pounds raisins 1 pound dates 10 eggs (8 will do) ¼ pound almonds ¼ pound walnuts ½ cup molasses (or rose water) ½ teaspoon cloves 1 teaspoon allspice 1 teaspoon mace 1 teaspoon mixed spice Vanilla ¾ teaspoon soda 5 cups Five Roses flour ¾ 3/4 or 1 cup brandy Brandy may be mixed with other ingredients or poured over cake when baked. Bake in very slow oven 3 to 4 hours.
This is a full-sized British-style fruitcake — around ten pounds of batter and fruit — and almost everything about it depends on low heat and long patience. Read the pan and oven notes before you start creaming butter.
- Very slow ovenSet the oven to 250–275F. At anything higher the outside will be dark and dry long before the centre sets, and the sugar in two pounds of currants will scorch.
- Pan size and liningThis makes a very large quantity of batter, more than a single 10-inch round will hold; plan on a large round plus a loaf tin, or several smaller tins, filling each about two-thirds. Line the pans with two layers of parchment (the period cook used buttered paper) extending above the rim, and wrap the outside in a collar of newspaper or a folded towel to slow the heat at the edges.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour, close to modern all-purpose. Five cups measured by dipping and levelling is about 625 g; weigh it if you can, since a heavy-handed cup or two will make the cake dry.
- Molasses or rose waterThese are not interchangeable in quantity. Half a cup of molasses is a normal amount; half a cup of rose water would be overpowering to most modern palates — use a tablespoon or two and make up the liquid with the brandy.
- Mixed spiceA British blend, typically coriander, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice and clove. Any commercial pumpkin-pie or speculaas spice stands in adequately.
- SodaThree-quarters of a teaspoon is deliberate. A cake this dense is not meant to rise much; the soda mostly tempers the acidity of the molasses and the fruit. Do not increase it.
- Fruit and nutsPit and chop the dates, blanch and slice the almonds, and toss all the fruit with a spoonful of the measured flour so it stays suspended. Five pounds of fruit and a half pound of nuts to five cups of flour means the batter is barely more than mortar -- expect to fold it with a sturdy spoon, not a mixer.
- Doneness and timingThree to four hours is right for a single large cake; loaves may be done in two and a half. A skewer should come out clean and the cake should smell baked rather than boozy. Cool completely in the pan before turning out, or it will break.
- Brandying and keepingIf you pour the brandy over the baked cake, do it while warm and in stages so it absorbs. Wrapped in brandy-dampened cloth and then foil, in a tin, it keeps for months and improves with keeping.
Heavy spiced fruitcake soaked in spirits is generally traced back to the enriched boiled plum puddings and "great cakes" of early modern Britain, and by the nineteenth century the baked version had settled into its role as the Christmas cake, and was often iced with almond paste and royal icing for the day. The Five Roses brand in the ingredient list points to the world of Canadian flour-company and community cookbooks of the period — the Five Roses Cook Book itself was first issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and assembled largely from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives — which is the milieu in which a recipe like this arrives with a personal endorsement rather than a formal method. The chatty preamble and the loose alternatives — eight eggs will do, molasses or rose water, three-quarters or a full cup of brandy — are characteristic of a recipe that had been made from memory many times before anyone wrote it down. The scale is also telling: a cake this large was not for one dinner but for a season of visitors, kept in a tin and cut thin as callers arrived.