Guest Recipe: Carol’s Caribbean Christmas Cake

Soak all the fruit in a bowl the day before in the apple juice and rum. This plumps up your fruit and will make your cake wonderfully moist.

Grease and line a 20cm tin.

Weigh out your dry ingredients into a bowl (Flour, mixed spices) and set aside.

Cream butter and sugar and add treacle and mix well.

Add the orange and lemon zest.

Add the eggs a bit at a time. If you get curdling add some flour between pouring in your eggs.

Drain your fruit and add to the mix with the chopped nuts.

Pour mixture into your tin. And line the outside with brown paper or newspaper and secure with string. This stops the sides burning.

Bake at 150 degrees for about 4 hrs. After 3 hrs check by pricking with a skewer and if it comes out clean then it’s done. Leave to cool in the tin and then turn out, prick the base and drizzle rum over.

Wrap in baking paper and foil and store in a tin.

Place cake on a cake board.

Arrange all of your glace fruits and nuts on top. Be creative!

In a pan place your apricot jam (about 4 tbsps) and a tbsp of water.

Bring to the boil stirring all the time until it is smooth then take off the heat. Add a tbsp of rum and stir well.

Using a pastry brush, brush over the fruit with the glaze. The glaze helps preserve your fruit, nuts and cake.

Brush the sides of your cake with your glaze.

Now roll out your marzipan in a long roll and make a collar to go around your cake making sure it goes about ¼” above the top of the cake.

Roll out your fondant icing and again make a collar to go around the cake to cover the marzipan. Be sure to dampen the marzipan before adding the icing so that it sticks to the marzipan. I always use a measure when doing this procedure so as to get the right size of collar around.

With the extra ¼” push down towards the cake. This is the lip where you will add your holly leaves.

Make a small amount of royal icing for piping your leaves on.

Cut out your holly leaves. Make sure you cut out plenty in large and small size.