Christmas cake? My kitchen looks more like a crime scene...

IT’S that time of year again. snipping candied peel to the strains of Classic FM. Manfully chopping up several dozen almonds; agonising as to whether the teaspoon of mixed spice should be scant, heaped or round. And, finally, spooning booze into something resembling a raisin-clotted curling stone.

And, too often, in the guilt-ridden sense that one is late. High in the crazed one-upmanship of crafting a Christmas cake is timing, ensuring the beast has weeks and weeks to mature before icing and consumption.

Ideally, decrees Delia smith, ‘we are at the end of October or the beginning of November’. Others insist it should be made a year ahead and, no doubt, there are those fanatics who have had their Crimbo 2019 offering somewhere cold and dark since tony Blair was PM.

that’s before we start to argue about sourcing the finest raisins, the rarer glacé cherries – you really have to go online to secure green or gold ones – the best unsalted butter or, indeed, deciding to make your own marzipan.

It matters because, while few of us rear our own turkeys, and you can nowadays buy a Christmas pudding as good as any you might whip up yourself, it is difficult to buy a good Christmas cake.

that is because it would be most expensive – the ingredients demanded for Delia’s classic recipe last week left me with little change from £30 – and industrial bakers inevitably cut corners, with cheap fats and fillers and the sort of icing fit only for grouting the bathroom.

YET, as you pad home from sainsbury’s with dark Muscovado sugar, unsalted French butter and high-end dried fruits, it is in the bleak knowledge failure (and I speak as a man who has forgotten the cake is in the oven, recall with a shudder the year two maturing cakes were destroyed by mice) is unthinkable.

Baking is most different from cooking. the good cook sloshes things in bowls, plays with searing heat, measures little and tastes continuously.

Baking has to be the stuff of heroin-dealing accuracy. the recipe – be it Delia or Nigel, Mary or Nigella – must be followed as if it were the instructions for bomb disposal and knowing, for instance, that ground mixed spice has a shelf life of about 40 minutes.

that chopping is not the same thing as dicing, and folding most different from stirring. And then there are the varying eccentricities of a given recipe.

Nigel slater’s Christmas cake formula calls for dried fruit in orgiastic quantities – dates and prunes and cranberries and apricots, on top of currants, raisins and sultanas.

You will be in for an afternoon of chopping, chopping, chopping, till finally you beg for death. And Delia exhorts righteous perfectionism at every turn, as if she were the Jo swinson of the kitchen island.

‘If you want to give your cake that five-star flavour,’ she rails, ‘then go for whole candied peel and look for the glistening signs of the new season’s crop.

No matter how good the original quality of the ready-chopped peel, it invariably seems to lose something in the chopping. Cutting it yourself is extra work, I know, but if you have a really sharp knife (or kitchen scissors) and something good on the radio it really is worth the effort.’

I suspect she would think Classic FM ever so slightly common. I am afraid I used Waitrose’s ready-chopped offering this year, but for weeks to come I shall be looking anxiously over my shoulder, lest retribution fly from Norfolk.

Christmas cake involves three ordeals. One is papery. Rich fruit cake is apt to scorch, so the baking tin must be doublelined in buttered greaseproof, the outside of the tin stoutly knotted with brown wrapping paper, and a round cap of greaseproof finally dropped on top of the mix.

Be assured, the best part of an hour will be lost in preparing your tin as discs of paper float off to be seized by the dog or you try to tie the string with only two hands.

Also, why do we never remember the epic stickiness? By the time you have weighed, washed, dried and chopped the cherries, zested the orange and the lemon and mastered the precise dessertspoonful of black treacle, most of you (and, indeed, most of the kitchen) will be bespattered with juice and syrup and sugar.

then, of course, there is the booze. Mary Berry’s Victorian Christmas cake kicks off with a three-day soaking of your fruits in a quarter-pint of sherry.

Every recipe demands brandy, though Delia does sanction whisky for her Christmas Dundee cake. And still more daunting is her Creole Christmas cake, calling for rum, brandy, cherry brandy, port and Angostura bitters.

THAT isn’t really a cake. that is Brendan Behan: the Final Days. And there are two daunting riddles. One is how to add the eggs to your creamed butter and sugar without it splitting. Curdle the mix, says Delia darkly, ‘and your cake won’t be quite as light.’ ‘It will curdle,’ asserts Nigel slater bullishly, ‘but don’t worry...’

And at last, how long do you cook the thing? Delia calls for four and a half hours, Nigella for three and a half, another for five hours.

they cannot all be right. It is possible they are all wrong. You really have to use your own judgment, waiting till it is nutbrown and springy to the finger. But, at last it is done and can be left overnight to cool in the tin before being hidden away somewhere, like a mad wife in the attic.

You will now have to ‘feed’ your cake. Delia suggests a weekly dose of brandy, but I just give mine a hefty glass after baking and then a good measure of sherry just before its rendezvous with marzipan.

this must be several days before the icing proper, as otherwise the almond oil will discolour it. there always seems to be far more marzipan than you need and you always find you have forgotten the apricot jam (the best adhesive).

Delia famously, in 1990, stripped pharmacies everywhere of liquid glucose when she revealed what is now the go-to recipe for fondant icing.

It’s weird stuff – like sticky, liquid glass – and absorbs epic quantities of egg white and icing sugar. You don’t so much make fondant icing as wrestle it into submission and, I always seem to leave fingerprints on the snowy end result, giving the completed cake the air of a crime scene.

In all, it is the most frightful fag. But then on the day, the turkey sizzling and the pudding aboil and as we sit down to watch the Queen, the cake is at last cut – moist, aromatic, the layers of icing and marzipan in joyous contrast to the fruit and nuts.

And everyone must say, ‘It’s your best ever,’ and dutifully help me eat it till the clocks go forward.