Emily Jonzen is a London-based food stylist and recipe writer with almost ten years of experience working on books, magazines, packaging, advertising and television projects.
See more of Emily Jonzen’s recipes
Emily Jonzen
Emily Jonzen is a London-based food stylist and recipe writer with almost ten years of experience working on books, magazines, packaging, advertising and television projects.
See more of Emily Jonzen’s recipes
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Ingredients
2 x 125g packs dried morello cherries
300g mixed sultanas and jumbo raisins
250g dried prunes, diced
200g glacé cherries, roughly chopped
zest and juice of 2 oranges
175ml amaretto liqueur, plus extra to feed
100g flaked almonds
250g soft butter, plus extra to grease
200g light brown sugar
4 medium eggs
150g plain flour
2 tsp ground mixed spice
2 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground nutmeg
100g ground almonds
1 tsp vanilla extract
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Step by step
Put the dried fruit, glacé cherries and orange zest and juice into a large pan and stir over a medium heat for 2-3 minutes, until the juice begins to bubble. Remove from the heat, stir through the amaretto and cover. Leave for 2 hours or overnight, for the fruit to plump up.
Preheat the oven to 140°C, fan 120°C, gas 1. Spread out the flaked almonds on a baking tray and toast in the oven for 10-15 minutes or until golden; leave to cool. Grease and line a deep 20cm, loose-based cake tin with a double layer of baking paper, making sure that it comes up at least 4cm above the top of the tin. Wrap the outside of the tin in a couple of sheets of newspaper and secure with kitchen string. Cut another sheet of baking paper to cover the top, cutting a small circle in the centre for steam to escape during baking.
In your largest mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugar together until light and creamy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then sift over the flour and spices plus a pinch of salt. Tip in the ground and toasted almonds, the vanilla and the soaked fruits along with any liquid from the pan. Gently fold everything together, until just combined. Scrape the mixture into the prepared tin, making a dent in the centre of the mixture (to help create a flat top during baking).
Cover the top with the prepared baking paper and bake for about 3½ hours, or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out almost clean (it may be slightly sticky but shouldn’t have any uncooked mixture on it). Leave to cool in the tin for 30 minutes, then invert onto a cooling rack, removing the base and baking paper. Once cool, wrap in a double layer of baking paper, then in a layer of foil, and keep in a cool, dark place. The wrapped cake keeps for up to 3 months.
If you want to feed the cake with extra amaretto, poke a few holes in the top of the cake with a co*cktail stick and feed with 1 tablespoon of amaretto every week or two. If you’re going to marzipan and ice the cake, stop feeding it at least a week beforehand, to let the surface dry out.
Adaptations to try
Skip the booze and make an alcohol-free cake using apple or orange juice instead of amaretto, and add 2 tsp almond extract if you still want that rich almond flavour.
You can use pretty much any combination of dried fruit that you like in the cake, as long as it adds up to the same total weight.
The amaretto can be subbed with whatever’s already in your drinks store: fruit-flavoured liqueurs, sherry, port or brandy, rum or whisky.
Use up any combination of unsalted nuts that are hanging around in your cupboard; sniff and taste to make sure they aren’t stale, then toast in the oven to bring out their flavour.
Don’t worry if you don’t have light brown sugar; you can use any type (other than icing sugar or jam sugar); the darker the colour, the deeper the flavour it adds to the cake.
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+ While brandy is the traditional partner for fruit cake, you could also try using a dessert sherry such as Pedro Ximénez. It's an intensely sweet, dark sherry made from the Spanish grape variety of the same name. Perfect in festive cakes, puddings and custards, you can find it in liquor stores.
Grease and line a 28cm bundt cake tin. Beat the butter with the sugar until light and fluffy, add the eggs and milk and mix, then fold in the flour spices and fruit until well mixed. Fold into the wet mix. Bake for 1¼ to 1½ hours until golden brown and firm in the middle, spoon over brandy then cool.
Christmas cakes are also commonly made with pudding while a fruit cake uses butter, however there are Christmas cake recipes that do contain butter. The traditional Scottish Christmas cake, also known as the Whisky Dundee, is very popular. It is a light crumbly cake with currants, raisins, cherries and Scotch whisky.
Cognac is probably the best substitute for brandy in fruitcake. That's because cognac is basically fancy brandy. The naming is just a bit of technicality.
You can use rum, brandy or whisky for spice, or if you like citrus flavours, try an orange liqueur. Cherry brandy and amaretto will also work well if you prefer these.
Some say you should make your Christmas cake 6 weeks before eating, but the advice given on Nigella.com is that 12 weeks before is the optimum time to get baking. Your Christmas cake should be fed every 4 to 6 weeks but in the meantime, after baking, it should be stored away in a secure, air tight container.
Whoever finds the fava bean in their slice is considered to have good luck for the coming year. Additionally, a small trinket or figurine is sometimes hidden in the cake, and the person who finds it is said to be the "king" or "queen" of the celebration.
Wrapping the tin in brown paper helps slow the baking of the cake to a more steady temperature, avoiding the outside of the cake being overdone (or worse, burnt) while the inside is still raw.
But a Michigan family has its own heirloom: a 141-year-old fruitcake. “It's a great thing,” said Julie Ruttinger, the great great granddaughter of Fidelia Ford, who baked the cake in 1878. “It was tradition.
1. Panettone, Italy. Originating from Milan, Italy, this cake has become one of the most popular Christmas cakes around Europe and in many parts of the world. The panettone is a dome-shaped spongecake with a sweet, yeasty taste.
25 rolls around — a fact that gave birth to an unfortunate bit of old Japanese slang: "Christmas cake" was used to refer to an unmarried woman who was over 25 and thus, considered past her prime.
Traditional amaretto may have borrowed from this recipe, using brandy and burnt sugar along with almonds. Most higher-quality amaretto is now made with oil extracted from apricot pits, however, sometimes in an amalgam of various fruit essences.
Let's start with the most important part: All Cognac is brandy, but not all brandy is Cognac. Think of brandy as the umbrella category that comprises spirits that have been distilled from fruit — by definition, either grapes or the fermented juice of another fruit.
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Prep time: 45 mins
