Nothing says Christmas like being a bit of a hypocrite

It's fairly well documented, that I don't really like Christmas.  Pretty much everyone knows this.  When I mentioned to my friend Tom that I was making a Christmas cake, he was genuinely shocked - you hate Christmas, he argued, Aliens have taken over your body haven't they?  I don't hate it, I just find that it goes on WAY too long.  

Christmas things are in the shops at the beginning of August.  If it started at the beginning of December I could probably cope a lot better.

Anyway, this year I am looking forward to Christmas marginally more than usual.  The Very Tolerant Boyfriend and I are spending it together at home with no guests, which helps.  And he loves Christmas and, you know, I want him to be happy.

So I agreed to make a Christmas cake.  I've never done this before.  I've helped my mother as a small child, but in the last decade and a half, I can confidently say that I have not participated in the production of one of these items.  Obviously I had absolutely no idea how to make it and I did have a quick think about outsourcing it to my little sister; but apparently she was all busy getting married or some such nonsense.  So I had a google and came up with this recipe

Ingredients 

  
450 g currants

175 g sultanas
175 g raisins
50 g glace cherries, chopped
50 g candied fruit, chopped
1/2 cup brandy
225 g flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg (fresh)
1/2 teaspoon mixed spice
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
225 g butter
225 g soft brown sugar, the gooey sort
4 large eggs
50 g chopped almonds
1 tablespoon treaclelemon, rind of
orange, rind of
orange, juice of 


*Soak all the fruit, peel and nuts over night in the brandy and orange juice.  Stir regularly.
*Pre heat the oven to 140C*line an 8 inch tin 
*Sift the flour salt and spices into a large mixing bowl.
*In a separate bowl cream the butter and sugar together until the mixture's fluffy.
*Beat the eggs and add them a little at a time.
*Fold in the flour and spices. 
*Stir in the fruit that has been soaking along with any excess liquid.
*Mix in the treacle.
*Spoon into the cake tin and spread out evenly.
*Cover the cake with a double square of greaseproof paper with a small hole in the top. 
*Bake the cake on the lower shelf for 4& 1/4- 3/4 hours

So after you've cooked it for nearly FIVE hours, you want to take a wooden skewer and poke holes in it (once it has cooled).  Then you wrap it in a double layer of baking parchment - I added a layer of tin foil too - and then pop it in a air tight container.

Then you need to feed the cake.  You're meant to drizzle a couple of teaspoons of brandy over the cake once a week for the next month or so.  I might have got a little bit carried away at this point.  I was sloshing on the brandy/rum/whisky every few days.  I am now seriously concerned that someone might have some cake and then try and drive.

But to look on the bright side, I do have an incredibly moist and rich looking fruit cake.  

When it came to icing the Very Tolerant Boyfriend had purchased some cake decorations, but afterwards I found a polar bear cupcake on Pinterest, which I thought I could up-scale to a full sized cake,

And it worked ok, I think.

We used the decorations that had been bought to create a random wintery scene at the front of the cake board.

All in all I am quite pleased with out effort, but I'll let you know how it tastes when I cut it open and feed it to our friends tomorrow night.

Steak Porn

As a treat, for nearly making it through the year without either of us dying, the Very Tolerant Boyfriend and I decided to treat ourselves to some utterly epic steaks.  Steaks of such beauty and magnitude that they would (and did) make grown men weep.

It had been a really beautiful day, bright and crisp.  We’d walked into town for a spot of lunch, picked up a few Christmas presents and then had half an hour to before meeting some friends to see an exhibition and have some cake.  As we were too far away from our usual butchers to get there and back in time, we ventured into Source in St Nicks; I’ve really only ever been in there for lunch before but their deli butchers is amazing.  The guy who served us was really knowledgeable about the meat, and didn’t try and push us towards the most expensive cut.

After opting for some T-bones (we didn’t listen to the butcher’s advice) we stood watching them  and a small crowd gathered around us to admire them.  The other butchers stopped their work to marvel.  It really sounds like I’m making this up, but I’m not. They were cut very thick, which is is the only way to eat steak and Source's meat is all aged for at least 28 days.

Anyway, when we finally got the beautiful steaks home, we left them out for an hour to bring them up to room temperature and marinated them in a measure of whisky and a measure of balsamic vinegar for an hour.  The steaks were so big that when we came to cook them, we had to use a separate griddle pan for each one.  We cooked them for five minutes on each side, turning them only once.  Mine was done to perfection, but the Very Tolerant Boyfriend’s which was slightly bigger might have benefited from another minute in the pan.

Served with baked sweet potatoes and sweet chilli broccoli.