Not the Sunday Snapshot

This is a WAY out of date post but I wanted to put it up anyway. This is the Christmas cake post!

Every year I bake a Christmas cake, it's a secret family recipe (that we give out to all and sundry) that is just YUMMY!  Most years I ice and decorate the cake too.  This year I almost made it to the final stages!

I love the whole process, I love to have the fruit soaking for as long as possible, I love dragging it down from on top of the cupboard and turning the container over to make sure all the fruit has a turn at sitting in the rum, I love every stage of the mixing and preparation, I love the smell coming from the oven as it gets close to being ready to pull out, I love to see the cake wrapped in towels sitting on my bench cooling ever so slowly, I love to open up the towels ready to ice the cake and smell that wonderful fruit cake smell again, I love it ALL.  I'm a bit of a fruit cake fan.  But I have been spoilt, this fruit cake is sooo good that often I wont even try other fruit cakes because I can tell just to look at them that they won't measure up.  I'll call it, I'm a fruit cake snob, I know I am and I can hold my head high anyway.

Okay, lets get down to business, there's lots of photos because I got a little carried away with the whole process... I'll try not to get too boring.

I had a cute little helper or two :-)  I'm not sure about other people but I find it helps to have all the ingredients out on the bench and put them away as I use them... that way if I have anything left at the end I know ahead of time that whatever I'm baking is going to be an absolute flop... not that I would ever have left out any ingredients, nope, not me!  Thankfully this time I got everything in and in the correct measures too!  That big bowl there, that has 1kg of mixed fruit and 1kg of sultanas and LOTS of rum to plump them all back up nice and fat (that is REALLY important, you have to soak your fruit or they steal the moisture from your cake).  This fruit had been soaking for about a month.

This was the last thing the poor old Kenwood made before it carked it.  I was fretting that it was the motor but it turns out it was just a worn part and Dad is trying to get a new part for me.

CUTE CUTE CUTE LITTLE HELPERS!!!

I like to stop here and eat lots and lots of mixture covered sultanas... mmmmm.

We made two 8in round cakes and lots of little cakes for munching until we got to eat the big one!

Em came over for the decorating.  We both decided on all white for our designs and she wanted a simple Christmas tree design and I wanted to try something different... a hill... with sheep and shepherds... and an angel or two... I would come to regret this thought.

Em did a super duper job getting the icing on her cake... we were very lucky to be able to use all mums tools from when she did this sort of thing for money!  She got her cake nice and smooth and we managed to keep the kids fingers away from it!

My "hill" was a little lumpy... it was really hard to get the circle cut evenly in two so we were trimming and turning and moving and packing out and stuff and then decided we'll have no cake left if we keep trimming so I gave up.  I finally got it covered and one of my sweet little helpers stuck their fingers in it... I know why mum just about went crazy trying to do this when my brother was little.

So here are our decorations...  over on the left we have "fluffy" sheep bodies with their heads laying next to them, Christmas trees and tree sections, shepherd bodies and their heads laying next to them... it all sounds a bit morbid really.

Do you want to know the worst thing about this post... Em took her cake partially completed because it had to travel to Brisbane with her so she thought it would be safer to finish it there and my design didn't work and I completely forgot to take a photo of what it did turn out like.  The weather here was a bit too humid to sustain the design I had in mind but I did reassemble some shepherds to stand with their flock for a quick photo before too much got eaten.

It was really yummy, just as I expected it would be :-)  So, even if my sheep had heads way bigger than they should have and even if my angel wouldn't stay in the sky because she was just too sweaty I will call it a success.

So, very little thought has gone into this post, blogger is mucking me around, it's really late at night, I am off to bed, sorry if this makes little or no sense, I'll probably re-read it tomorrow morning and go "What was I on last night???"

and just to warn you... there's still more Christmas posts coming!