Time for baking the Christmas Cake

While Christmas seems such a long way away during the summer it is nonetheless high time for baking the Christmas cake. This is a traditional English Christmas cake I am talking about, a rich fruit cake, that improves immensely by sitting and maturing before being eaten. For me personally, my guideline is to bake the cake between my birthday and my husband's birthday - which works, with me being July and him being September. But not the day before his birthday, as my son said, since it is important that I still bake a birthday cake for the birthday! At any rate, baking the Christmas cake in the second half of summer works well, since this gives the cake enough time to mature and be fed brandy once or twice a month all through the autumn.

For those of you wondering, I should add that I do not also feed myself brandy when I feed the cake! But feel free to do so, if you wish. Just bear in mind the tale from my parents: they had some friends who wanted to also try baking the Christmas cake, but then complained that it was very expensive to make. It turned out that not only did they feed brandy to the cake, but also to themselves. And they fed brandy to themselves also when the cake did not get, with the result that they generally finished off the bottle of brandy before the next feeding of the cake. So they needed to buy a lot of bottles of brandy!