This cake, to be precise.
My entry in the office Christmas Bake-Off.
Deck the halls with manky bits of holly whose berries have shrivelled up. 'Tis the season for eighteen hardy volunteers to battle it out in a flour-strewn gladiatorial arena.
No prize except the honour of stomping your rivals into the dust, and the fact that for eighteen days (one competitor per day) we stuffed ourselves stupid with wonderful cake.
And those cowards who declined to take part didn't get a single crumb. Ha!
And those cowards who declined to take part didn't get a single crumb. Ha!
I'll post the best and worst from the Christmas Bake-Off after this.
But first … Don your pinnies and follow me into the kitchen …
Nope, not my kitchen. In my bid for Bake-Off glory I'm bringing in some heavy fire power to help me and borrowing mum's kitchen and oven (way better than mine) and her Jedi cake-baking powers.
The Guinness is there because I'll be baking the only cake I ever bake: Guinness Cake.
Happy, drunken sultanas! Basically, you soak these suckers in Guinness overnight, which is as good an excuse as any to be sociable and not force them to drink alone.
Eggy.
Hokay … time to get nasty. Smash the skulls of three innocent eggies and whip them suckers until they scream.
Or go frothy.
Actually, frothy's probably better for this dish.
Actually, frothy's probably better for this dish.
About yay much butter.
You know how I hate using any measurements. Unfortunately baking requires precision, so here's a list of ingredients you'll need if you want to join me in enjoying one of the finest cakey experiences known to man:
6oz. raisins
6oz. sultanas
Whaddya mean, "How much is that in kilogrammes?" I have not the faintest idea. Bollocks to the metric system. I was raised on Imperial measurements and I can only think in them. I have absolutely no idea how long a litre is or how much a kilometre weighs and frankly, my dears, I don't give a damn. If I have to give measurements they'll be in roods and perches and pecks and barrels and yards and furlongs and hundredweights and stones and real money; none of this "I can only count up to ten" malarkey.
Okay?
Right …
Raisins, blah, sultanas, blah …
8 tablespoons of Guinness. Yay!
Soak that lot in a bowl overnight, while you drink and then sleep off the rest of the Guinness.
Next day, grease and line a seven-and-a-half inch tin and pre-heat your oven (or mum's in this case) to gas mark three (which is the equivalent of something whatever-ish in electric ovens, apparently).
You'll also want:
6oz. butter (about yay much)
3 eggs
6oz dark sugar (a mix of natural molasses sugar and soft raw cane is good)
8oz plain flour (don't ask me what that is in American. We have plain or self-raising flour; across the pond I suspect they have something else; it's like when they call single cream haff'n'haff, or chickpeas garbanzo beans … Garbanzo beans? That sounds like a circus act, not something I'd want to put in my mouth - I just don't get it … anyhoo, you'll want 6oz of whatever plain flour is in America)
2 teaspoons of mixed spice
A generous grating of whole nutmeg
3oz peel
3oz chopped mixed nuts.
Ready?
Let's go!
Cream the butter and sugar together until it's what mum calls "light and fluffy" and I call yummy.
Gradually add the frothy eggs, floophing a little flour in there each time you get eggy.
Oh, and I claim dibs on the neologism "Flooph" for the sound flour makes.
Another reason I'm over at mum's is that she has a food processor and, as I don't bake, all I have at home is a bunch of knives and a pestle and mortar. Great for what I do but crapola when it gets to cake time.
So … onward.
Time to get gloopy … yay!
Sift whatever flour you've got left together with the spices and fold into the glop.
Add the soaked fruit, the Guinness, the peel and nuts and slowly FOLD them all into the mixture.
"Fold" is the important word here (though not like in origami … origami with sloppy gloppy cake mix is something that should only be practiced in the bedroom between consenting adults). You want to combine everything in as gloopy a way as possible but you DO NOT want to knock the air out. This sucker's got to be light. It's not cloying like most fruit cakes; this is seriously good to eat.
G.L.O.O.P.
Hell, yeah.
Slop that lot into the tin and flatten softly with a metal spoon (you get to lick it clean afterwards which 'as any fule kno' is the REAL reason to bake cakes).
A stupid moustache is not mandatory, but as the next time I bake a cake is likely to be next Movember, I'll probably have to grow another one for that.
Okey dokey. Cake in the oven … like so.
Now we get an hour and a half to spend in decadent leisure.
Er … doing the washing up.
Ninety minutes later, check the cake is done by sticking it with a skewer. If the thing comes out clean, it's perfect.
Like this one.
Now comes a few weeks of cakey alcoholism.
Wrap your cake in greaseproof paper and foil and stick it somewhere out of the way.
Once a week, unwrap it, make a load of holes in the bottom with a long needle and sloooowly dribble Guinness Extra and twelve year old Armagnac into it.
Actually you can add what you want, but as you'll be left with lots of booze it may as well be something you'd choose to drink anyway. I've never understood people who cook with cheap wine or bake with crap brandy. What the hell would I do with three-quarters of a bottle of three-star smegging Napoleon? Bugger that! Twelve year old Armagnac it is.
I couldn't be arsed to ice it, so I boiled up a glaze with apricot jam and a little water, glazed the top, plonked on a load of nuts and glacé cherries, slopped some more glaze on to keep things in place while I drove, drizzled on some more Armagnac and headed out the door for the office.
It tastes way better than it looks. Holy crap, that's a good cake. Moist but not TOO moist, light and still fruity and nutty, and every bite you take brings a face full of Armagnac fumes.
Make one. If I can do it then you certainly can.
Enjoy!
20 comments:
Wow, that's a CAKE! I'm expecting it to get up and destroy Tokyo any minute. I will have to try this recipe, but I plan on substituting dried cranberries for raisins.
Btw, I read elsewhere to spritz the cake with the alcohol using a spray bottle. Rebuttal?
Cranberries sound a yummy alternative, Vanda.
Spritzing the thing will just coat the surface and evaporate; a cake needs to be "fed" with deep injections of alcohol to keep it moist and macerate the fruit.
Then drink the rest.
Go for it!
That's not cake, that's art. Let me know who to kneecap in the unlikely event that you are not the winner.
Well done Son glad you learned something good from me!
Now you have to lose that waistline after all that cake eating, well better wait until after we have had our Christmas goodies first!
Oh, my, that looks and sounds so wonderful. How much Guinness and cognac did you add at a time? Did you alternate?
And to Ms. Alifan, congratulations - you have an interesting son who can make a wonderful cake! (Full, too, I'm not forgetting him)
Gorgeous looking cake Dive, but in protest to your cheap wine comments, I receive a cheap Christmas German Reisling every year that makes the best cooking wine. I am afraid to tell my friend that I do not like his wine because it makes a kick ass sauce.
WOWWOWWOWWOW!!! I'll think there will be some baking going on here on the plantation very, very, very soon, sugar! xoxooxooxxo
That is a CAKE. You go to a lot of trouble!
I think if you search "conversion" or "conversion chart" online you can find metrics vs. ounces/pounds/etc.
Thank you, Lucio, but when you see what I was up against you'll know that the world of office Christmas Bake-Offs is a cut-throat and fiercely fanatical place. There were some AWESOME festive fatteners on display. I'll post them soon.
Mum, thanks for all your help (and your oven). After eighteen days of cakey consumption coming to a sudden end I'm getting withdrawal symptoms so Christmas cannot come soon enough for my rumbling tum.
Speedway, I added about a tablespoon of each, once a week; Guinness first and then Armagnac.
Licking the spoon was nice.
Neetzy, there are many uses for cheap German Riesling, most of them non-culinary, but a good tip is to re-gift it to someone you don't care for and then enjoy a bottle of really expensive German Riesling, which is another creature altogether and one of the planet's deepest joys.
If cheap wine makes a good sauce, better wine makes it even better.
Savannah: enjoy! Licking that basin clean makes all the washing up worthwhile. xoxoxoxoxox
Petrea, good food is worth going to a little trouble.
I have to use metric at work. One of the good things about being older is that all the experienced guys on site talk in Imperial so the graduate kids can't keep up. I'm fluent in both but I am an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud.
Ha ha and I am stuck in lbs and ounces as I am old and not able to understand the reason of all the change...
Just done another load of baking and after all the washing up..washed the kitchen floor then looked on here again and realised soon that oven will have to be cleaned , whoops when I get the chicken out of it that is cooking.
Neetzy I use whatever wine is available to cook with normally, but I am naughty and use Marsala in my gravy..yummy.. maybe that is where Full and Dive get there love of good wine from.
The reason for the change to metric was that mainland Europeans are crap at maths and could not calculate things in their heads like how much change you'd get from a fiver if you bought three things at seventeen-and-six, two at four and thruppence three-farthings and one at half-a-crown.
At least the Americans kept to the Imperial system, even if they did change their money to a more simplistic decimal currency.
The whole world is dumbing down.
Enjoy your chicken, and don't knock back too much Marsala.
It looks great, David. And I bet the taste is just as wonderful. My father used to make a fruit cake sort of like this every Christmas. He's start a couple of weeks before and soak the thing in so much whiskey that it would weigh a ton by Christmas day. You could hardly lift it from it's spot up high on top of the fridge.
Ah, now that sounds like my kind of cake, Robyn.
We have the same flour as you Royalists do, but what the heck is "mixed spice"? And 3 oz peel of what? Lemon? Orange? Cumquat? Are British and US ounces the same?
Vanda, mine are not the ways of baking; mine is the tao of the stove-top, one-pot mess (as you know from the past What's Cooking" posts), and so I have no idea what spices might be in mum's baking tin. The peel is from lemons and oranges, diced up small and English and US ounces and pounds were the same when you were our colony so if you've not done anything silly with them (like you did with shoe sizes) then they should still be the same.
By the way, my Colonial correspondent tells me she didn't know there were fourteen pounds in a stone or what a fortnight was, so I can only assume someone over there has messed with the measurements.
That is one magnificent CAKE! I hope it was well appreciated by your office mates (although it sounds like it'd have to be covert appreciation due to the competition). I hope yours won the Big Prize :-)
Thank you, Ms.M. It went down a treat. Lots of compliments, including from the boss. Yay!
Well Dive, as it happens, things got buggered up, but you Royalists are just as much to blame.
"At one time, the British gallon differed depending on what you were measuring and where you were measuring it. But, by the 19th century, two definitions had survived: the Queen Anne (or Wine) gallon, which was 231 cubic inches, and the Winchester (or Ale) gallon, of 282 cu in.
In 1824, the British abandoned both the Ale and the Wine gallons in favour of the Imperial gallon, based on the volume of 10 pounds of water (which works out at 277.41945 cu in). America, by this time, had already standardised on the Wine Gallon of 231 cubic inches (strictly speaking, this was defined as the volume of a cylinder 6 inches long and 7 inches in diamete, or, using the old approximation for pi, 231 cubic inches).
The result is that the US gallon is 83.267% of the British gallon. In more usable terms, the British gallon is about a fifth greater than the US gallon, and the US gallon is about 5/6 of the British gallon (or a little under 7 British pints)"
Furthermore:
"Of course it isn't just liquids that are measured by volume. While the Imperial system allows gallons to be used as both liquid or dry measures (8 gallons = 1 bushel), the US system keeps them separate. The Americans adopted the old British Winchester Bushel for their dry measures, and this is defined as 2150.42 cu in (equivalent to 0.97 British Bushels). Like the gallon, this was not an arbitrary volume, but was based on the volume of a container of 18.5 inches diameter, and 8 inches in height.
Like the Imperial bushel, the US bushel is divided into 4 pecks, 8 gallons, 32 quarts or 64 pints - so that the US dry volumes are different in size to their liquid volumes, even though the names are the same.
So, not only are gallons different, but so are bushels, pints, and fluid ounces - and each by a different factor!"
http://www.miketodd.net/encyc/measures1.htm
Vanda, I am so impressed.
Me too, Vanda!
It seems we are not just two nations divided by a common language, but also by a common system of weights and measures where the same weights mean different things. Whizzy!
An English ten gallon hat would be very silly indeed.
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