There is nothing more rewarding than baking your own Christmas cake and serving it to loved ones on Christmas Day.
We have a couple of links to favorite cake recipes but see a couple of tips below to create the perfect traditional Irish Christmas Cake.
- Leave yourself at least 2 weeks before Christmas to make your cake.
- Try and soak the fruit in alcohol for 2/3 days for maximum moisture and flavor.
- Add a splash of ‘Holy Water’ aka ‘Moonshine’ or ‘Poitín’ into the mix along with your whiskey or brandy. This will give your cake the Irish twist. You may have picked a bottle up along your tour of Ireland.
- Make sure all ingredients are at room temperature when putting them together.
- Although the cake is good to go when it comes out of the oven it actually matures with age. Especially when it is drip fed alcohol.
- As an added bonus the baking of the Christmas cake will make your house smell gloriously authentically festive and leave you feeling like a domestic Goddess. This might be a good time to have your neighbours round!
- The Christmas Cake is a traditionally rich and heavy cake. A good trick to lighten up this cake is to leave out the treacle in the recipe.
- Divide your cake mix and make mini Christmas cakes for the perfect Christmas gift.
- Keep it simple.Innovation has no place in the Traditional Christmas Cake recipe.
- Here is a list of a couple of Overland favorite recipes:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2607642/make-and-mature-christmas-cake
https://odlums.ie/recipes/christmas-cake/
Fun Fact about Christmas Cake: The spices and dried fruits in the cake are supposed to represent the exotic eastern spices brought by the three Wise Men to the newborn King!
