Weekend Holiday Cookin'

Gentle friends, well, since it was "stir-up" Sunday , that's what I did, I stirred up my Christmas Cake.....  while I was creaming the butter and sugar - I prepared the spring-form pan...  double parchment layers on all sides, buttered and then two more layers tied around the outside....  this I think was that hardest part of the whole cake - tying that damn string - and it ain't pretty, but it held the parchment on!

... tied on a ready to go....... 

 ... the basic batter of butter, sugar, spice, eggs, flour, zest.....  all mixed together...

 ... alternately adding the nuts and "boozy" fruit by hand.....  the batter was getting really thick and hard to stir so I juiced the lemon and added the juice to the mix.......  I had read some recipes that called for juice others that didn't, but the addition of the juice made the stirring much easier...

 ....the batter was so very thick that it was basically a non-pouring batter .....  so.....  after "plopping" the batter into the pan and smoothing the top down it looked like this before going into the oven..... 

 ......  here is a snap after 3 1/2 hours and hot out of the oven ....  I tested it at 3 hour mark,  but it just wasn't there so I gave it another half hour and that did the trick.......

 ......  and here is the cake all cooled, I pulled the bottom paper off and wrapped the whole cake up in two layers of parchment and a double layer of foil and it now sits snuggle in a cake tin..... I had to let the cake sit out over night for it to get cold and I'll feed is a few teaspoons of rum tonight and then once a week until Christmas week.......  when I'll make my own marzipan to cover the cake - which has to dry a couple of days before decorating it with some home made fondant............

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..... I also got a start on Thanksgiving.....  I made my cranberry sauce and got my Onion/Jalapeno cornbread made and it will be good and stale by Thursday!!

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That's about it for today sports fans, thanks for stopping by do stop again!!!  I've had a couple of emails and questions about my Christmas Cake Recipe, and yes, I will post it - but at the moment it is just notes and and I need to transcribe it into recipe form - which I hope to get to this week.

Take care,

edgar