A couple of weeks ago we made our Christmas cakes. We had so much fun baking together, it reminded me of baking at school, all taking turns to stir although we never added brandy to anything we made at school. I imagine some of the lessons would have been a little more interesting if we had.
We’ve looked after our cakes; we’ve fed them and wrapped them and kept them cool and this week it was time to ice them. We heated the jam with a little water to thin it out and brushed it over the cakes making sure that they were nice and sticky. We took turns to roll out the marzipan, we also took turns in eating the marzipan. Marzipan is such a Christmas tradition, you wouldn’t eat it at any other time of year, a bit like dates. I love marzipan and would happily just eat it on its own, tearing off big chunks at a time.
We left what was left of the marzipan to harden a little while we made to royal icing, whisking until it was stiff, like sugary Artex. The fun part was spreading the icing, quite therapeutic.
The cakes looked lovely even if we do say so ourselves. We left the icing to set whilst we had tea and then finished the cakes off with some festive decorations.
Icing cakes makes you hungry and we couldn’t resist, we made a cup of tea and cut ourselves a slice. We know we should have waited until Christmas, but we couldn’t, it was too tempting. It was delicious and we enjoyed every mouthful, we chatted about our Christmas baking and shared family traditions, it was a very enjoyable afternoon and the icing on the cake is the fact that we had the foresight to make two cakes, so we still have one left for Christmas.