Christmas Cake - Part II

The next step in the Christmas cake saga is to bind everything together with a simple sugar/butter/eggs/flour mixture.  The only unusual thing is to use dark brown muscovado sugar which gives the mixture its dark colour and a unique taste. Interestingly this particular recipe (unlike, say, Delia's) doesn't use any of the traditional Christmassy spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg or mixed spice. The 'Christmassy' (for Brits anyway) taste and smell comes from the sugar and fruit.

Here's the cake all ready to go into the oven for 4 hours. The recipe gives complicated instructions about lining the tin with a double thickness of greaseproof paper, wrapping brown paper round the prepared tin and then standing the cake on brown paper while cooking.  I have no idea why you have to do this but we followed the instructions anyway.

Here's the finished unwrapped cake.  The next step is to wrap it in greaseproof paper and tin foil and then store it in an airtight tin, before 'feeding' it once a week with brandy.  The cake will keep like this until the week before Christmas when I'll take it out and ice it.  The next step for me is looking out kitsch decorations online.

I assume that any Americans readers are staring to understand why this only gets made once a year.