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A proper Christmas cake can take up to three months to develop flavor. Mine just takes an afternoon. This is my family's Christmas cake, dark, rich, full of fruit and flavor and it is ready the day it's baked. Hi, I'm Gemma Stafford, a professional chef from Ireland and today I'm going to show you my fruit cake step that is going to do the work of three months. Also the great sugar you can use to give your cake a beautiful color and flavor and I'm going to share with you my Irish family Christmas tradition. Unlike most Christmas cakes and fruit cakes and cakes alike, this is where this one starts.
It is almost like a cheat process to get the most amount of flavor and texture and loveliness into our cake without having to wait for three months to do it. So we're going to start out on the stove top and we're going to add in all of our fruit. Here we have some lovely plump raisins. For the holiday desserts in Ireland, it all starts with the same basis. Fruit, alcohol, a lot of sugar. So here we have golden raisins. If you've ever seen a recipe that calls for sultanas, guess what? They're actually golden raisins and guess what? I just learned that like a year ago. I really feel like I should have known that sooner than now but I didn't. But there you go. So a lot of sultanas, some glassaet cherries. Now we use a lot of
glassaet cherries in Ireland and if you can buy them in your store, great. If you cannot, do not worry. And I've got a recipe of how you can make them at home yourself and what they are is fresh cherries candied in a sugar syrup and they're really nice. I will ask you please try and buy good quality because those bright red electric cherries are not the best. Here we have some prunes. Get them nice and diced. So everybody's mix of fruit in Ireland is different. This is my mixture. If you go to your and see what you have, you can feel free to use what you have as long as you make up the weight. But this is kind of the balance of flavors and textures that I like. Into this we're going to add in some lemon zest, water, as we say in Ireland, Ishqaba'a, which
is whiskey. Now I like to use whiskey. You can use rum, brandy, something like that. So the reason I like to use whiskey is because this is actually my family's Irish whiskey from where I grew up in the southeast of Ireland. Michael Stafford bottles this in the southeast of Ireland and Odryskal is the name of Michael's grandfather and I grew up knowing him and it has a wonderful taste. You can buy it online. I'll put the link in the description box and you can get it in America and you can actually get it around the world. So those are all of our ingredients. So this is where the magic happens. On with your lid.
Very important. Turn on the stove top and what we're doing here is speeding up the process that we normally do with a Christmas cake. When we make Christmas cake, we soak the fruit the night before, minimum, sometimes even up to a few days. But here, this is kind of like a last minute Christmas cake. So what we do is we're going to cook very gently the fruit with the alcohol and it will plump up. Putting that lid on is so important because that is going to keep in that steam, it's going to keep in that flavor and it's going to help the fruit plump up even more.
This process here will help you get flavor and lovely plump fruit that you would in an Irish Christmas cake without having to wait for days. So it's kind of like my secret trick. October is roughly the time that Irish families start to make their Christmas cakes and get them ready for December and their Christmas puddings and their mincemeat. Now the reason we do this is so we can age it and the flavor develop. Now the reason it does that is because it has a lot of sugar in it. It will in a few minutes and it has high alcohol and that will preserve your cake, your mincemeat, your puddings and it will stop them from going bad. If you do not
want to put alcohol in this, feel free to use orange juice. That's totally fine. Just know that without the alcohol your cake won't be preserved as long and you might want to keep it in a fridge or a freezer. Apart from that you are good to go with orange juice. So it's been a few minutes. Our mixture is simmering, steaming and I can tell that we're done because if I give it a stir a lot of our liquid has been absorbed and our fruit is hydrated and that's the purpose of this step is to hydrate that fruit. Often when you do a traditional cake you do cold liquid overnight. Heating up the liquid makes it absorb and hydrate the fruit faster and if you ask me a little bit better so you really get all of that flavor. Give it that
base of our Christmas cake and it has almost soaked up all of the liquid. Once you've gotten to this stage you can move on to the next step. Off the gas and carefully follow me over to the countertop. So when your fruit comes off the stovetop let it sit for around 20 minutes or so. Let it soak but most importantly let it cool down before we add in our other ingredients because eggs are going to go in here soon. So that is nice and cool. As you can see lovely and plump, nice and soft all in just a few minutes. So this is a good temperature and the thing about this cake is we're kind of going to build it and mix it in the pot. No mixer is needed, no extra bowls, it's kind of down and dirty. So in goes our butter. I
like to use salted butter and our sugar. Now in Britain and in Ireland it's very popular to use muscovado sugar. We make a lot of our holiday recipes with so what it is a natural unrefined cane sugar. It has lovely molasses caramelly flavors. If you can't find this feel free to use dark brown sugar. This is the muscovado sugar that I use and because we use many different types of brown sugar in Ireland and in England I actually created a post on biggerbolderbaking.com explaining the different types just to make sure you use the right one in the right application. Mix in that brown sugar and butter until the butter is melted and the sugar will dissolve pretty much with the residual heat of the fruit. I can feel just mixing
it that the sugar has dissolved. So just so you know the reason I mixed in the butter and the sugar first is to actually cool down the mixture also before we add in the rest of our ingredients. So here I have some flour. So the flour we use for this cake is self-raising flour because it includes the raising agent for this cake even though it's a very heavy cake it lightens it up a little bit. If you can't find it in a store I have a little recipe on biggerbolderbaking.com all it is a little bit of plain flour and baking powder. And we have the usual spices that we use to make cake in Ireland. We have mixed spice, we have cinnamon, cloves and allspice. That's a lot of different spices I get it. For mixed spice can actually be replaced with pumpkin spice
and which I often do and then just mix up a little few. I do have a recipe for mixed spice on biggerbolderbaking.com and the reason I have it there is because a lot of people living outside of Ireland and England requested the recipe and it was also kind of hard for me to find. So you can actually make it yourself really easily. So just mix all those dry ingredients together first like this until the spices are combined and then add that into your fruit followed by your slivered almonds. These are blanched and very thinly sliced. Now for our egg make sure you beat it up first so it combines so much easier into our pot.
Also room temperature so if your fruit is still a little bit warm the cold eggs won't cook on the surface. And then just swiftly mix all that together until you have a smooth rich batter. So as I'm mixing the cake I'm going to share with you the tradition that I mentioned about what we do in Ireland. And when I was growing up when my mom would make the cakes she would have all the kids because there was five of us come in stir the cake and make a wish and we'd line up and every single one of us did it. And it's so popular so many Irish families do this and it's actually such an old tradition that we have a day called Stir It Up Sunday and I remember I did a short about it which featured George and Kevin where we all stirred it and it
was really fun. That's it I made my wish let's hope it comes true. Okay lovely time to get it into our pan. Now let's talk about cake pans. I remember every holiday season when my mom was making her Christmas cakes she would have all her pans she made many had them already the day before she'd have them lined. Christmas cake takes a very long time to cook this is going to take around two hours to two hours and 15 minutes and which is a long time in a pan. So here's this trick good quality pan high sides this is a big old cake a good quality one means it'll be thicker and it will protect it from the oven because it's going to be in there for so long.
Now really important line the bottom line the sides you can even line the sides twice this doesn't only help you get your cake out but it also protects the sides being in there for so long and stop them from burning. So that's really important a well-prepared pan is what you need. This pan is eight inches and the sides are actually four inches rather than two inches like a standard pan and I can put a link on my website of where I got this pan. This is a very thick cake as you can see just get an offset honestly even like a butter knife because that's usually what's closer and just level it out try and level it out as best you can I'll tell you why because it's such a dense heavy cake it's not going to be like
melting and moving around like you know like a yellow cake or a Madeira cake so just give it a nice flatten out on the top. So there you go it's ready it is really heavy so it's going to take some time so let's get it into the oven. So the secret to a big old fruit is baking it low and slow. Bake it at 300 degrees Fahrenheit 150 degrees Celsius and it's going to take around two to two hours and 15 minutes roughly around there. If you feel like it's getting too brown at any point and cover it with some foil or move it down into the oven but it's going to be in there for a long time it needs all of those minutes to make sure that it's cooked all the way through. So while the cake is baking I just want to answer these
few questions that came in biggerbolderbaking.com as part of the bold baking hotline. So one of the questions that I touched on a little bit was can you change the fruit and absolutely you can sometimes I don't have the right amounts of everything and I make a mix of whatever I have in my cupboard. Also if you want to add in mixed peel because you have that there then that's totally fine to do so. Some people add in grated apple and whatever you add into your fruit cakes will be totally fine. So how long does the cake keep? Great question. Once it's cooled completely cooled you are going to wrap it in parchment and foil is what my mom always did. You can keep it in a cupboard at room temperature for many months.
It can stay there up until Christmas time the flavor will develop. Now there's something what we call feeding the cake and I have a post on my website about it where every few weeks you go in and you put some holes in the top and then you drizzle over whiskey or whatever your alcohol is you put in the cake and that will keep it preserved. It will keep it fresh. It will also add extra flavor so when it comes to Christmas time your cake will be so moist and delicious full of flavor possibly a little bit drunk but it'll make it really good and it makes it last longer. Like in my house my mom has had Christmas cakes for up to a year and I know there's many Irish people out there who've probably done the same. So
you know if what doesn't kill you will only make it stronger. So my cake took the full two hours and 15 minutes. It does need a lot of time. If you want to make sure it's done stick a skewer in the middle. So you do not have to wait very long to enjoy this cake when it's completely cooled it's ready to eat. A fruit cake is a fixture on a Christmas table in every house in Ireland. This dark dense moist cake lined with fruit sugar and a little bit of booze is not something I always enjoyed as a kid but now as an adult it's almost like my soul food. It reminds me of Christmas in Ireland, cold weather, my mom's baking and family together. In Ireland there's a saying you may as well be hung for a sheep as the lamb so when it comes to
my Christmas cake I always like to smear some butter on top before I eat it and the rich flavors of the molasses sugar, the warmth of the whiskey and the spices and all that plump juicy sweet fruit definitely has you coming back for more. So that's how you make a beautiful Christmas cake in just one afternoon. No waiting, no feeding unless you want to. For this recipe head to biggerbolderbaking.com and let me know in the comments below what kind of Christmas traditions you have in your house because I would love to hear them. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you back here again very soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking.
