I was honestly going to make a Christmas cake this year, but I was diverted from my mission by a cake which arrived at work for us to sample mid-week. It was full of fruit which had been soaked in alcohol for months so it tasted just like a Christmas cake should .The dried fruits on the top were artfully arranged and glazed to give it a jewel like sparkle. I was immediately seduced into placing an order. Another year when I won’t be making a Christmas cake with my own fair hands!

It’s been the story of my life really. For some years one of my sisters sent me a Christmas cake. All I had to do was to pierce it with sate sticks and feed it some brandy on a regular basis to make it moist. Even this must be done with care. If you don’t turn it on a regular basis the bottom can be swimming in alcohol and the top remain dry as I discovered.

And then there were the years when making the family Christmas cake was done at my mother in law’s, and enjoyed over a glass of sherry or a pot of tea . She preferred not to ice, but in the last part of the baking simply to make a decorative pattern on top with blanched almonds.

I did make one once aided and abetted by my daughter who felt it was time for us to bow to tradition and bake our own Christmas cake at home. She had been given a great recipe. We gathered bags of dried fruits from an organic food store in grey Lynn which reputedly had the tastiest mixture. Chopping the dried fruits took forever and it made a cake of such enormity that large chunks of Christmas cake lingered in the freezer for several months.

After eating copious slices of it over the Christmas season no-one showed much interest in demolishing the remains. Rather than waste them eventually I crumbled them, soaked them in  cointreau to soften them and stirred them through ice-cream. Problem solved!

Years ago, when my new sister in law Angela arrived in New Zealand it must have felt really strange for her to have a winterless Christmas. She brought her love of traditional British Christmas fare, including of course the cake!

She baked a new recipe. It had a foot in both cultures. Alongside the sultanas and nuts there were tropical dried fruits including pineapple and pawpaw. It made a nice culinary statement about where she had come from and where she was now. You could call it a Pacifika Christmas cake.

For this cake you don’t soak the fruit before baking but toss it in the flour which no doubt prevents it from sinking to the bottom. It’s laden with fruit and nuts. No spices but the mixture of 4 essences gives it a subtle and complex flavour. To bake it at that time she would have used greaseproof paper, but I’d use baking paper. No need to grease and so easy to use. But it’s still important to use a double layer of it to prevent a charred bottom.

I loved it, begged her for the recipe, jotted it down and then it lingered unused in my recipe file  for several decades. I rediscovered it again recently and remembered how good it was. Full of good intentions I was planning to make it this Christmas But now that I have my Christmas cake sorted it will have to wait for another year. It’s another case of the Christmas cake I never made.

I didn’t  get round to it but she has, to welcome her daughters who will be home from America and Brussels for Christmas this year and are looking forward to a taste of home. The recipe was still in her cookery files, cut out of a newspaper in the eighties. The author now lost in the realms of time but the recipe well worth passing on.