Christmas cake

Every year I make a Christmas cake. I really enjoy baking it and I always do it at the same time every year, the last weekend of October, which is the same weekend my mum has always made hers. My birthday is also at the end of October so for me, much like Americans see the day after Thanksgiving as the start of the run-up to Christmas, I always see the my birthday as being the same (in fact, Christmas Day is exactly eight weeks after my birthday). For years now I've used Delia's recipe, just as my mum did.

The decorating, however, is a different thing. This is the part of making the Christmas cake that I find most stressful. As long as I can remember my mum has used Royal icing to top her cake, whipped up to look like snow and with much-loved plastic figures plonked on top to decorate. I tried this one year but I found the Royal icing too sweet and have otherwise always plumped for ready-to-roll fondant icing which is readily available in cake decorating shops and large supermarkets (or even small ones, I found mine this year in the Tesco Metro in Hammersmith station after the enormo-Tesco in Watford let me down).

So how to decorate? I wish I had pictures of past cakes but for some reason I either didn't bother or they're not on this laptop but I remember stars and silver balls, and holly and ivy. One of my favourites which I adapted from a design in a magazine was last year's (see above). The snowmen I already had but the Christmas trees, snow balls and snow were made from fondant icing. I dusted some edible glitter freely about - it looked much better in the flesh but just looks like dirt in the picture. And the path is made from chopped hazelnuts. I was pretty pleased with the overall result.

This year however, I just didn't have a clue what I was going to do. I thought, I pondered, but I made not definite decisions, didn't buy anything in and so was standing over the freshly iced Christmas cake on Christmas Eve thinking 'What now?!' In the end my Blue Peter watching of old came to the rescue and I decided to get creative. With just a piece of A4 paper, a pair of scissors and a large drink I started to cut, and cut, and cut! And I made a snowflake! I then used drawing pins to pin the snowflake to the top of the cake, brushed the holes with edible glue and then brushed over that with edible Magic Dust. When the doily/snowflake came off I was just left with the problem of the holes the drawing pins had made, so I painted a little edible glue over each one and plopped in a gold ball. Ta-da! Not the best decorated Christmas cake I've ever come up with but appropriately sparkly and rather festive.