Christmas cake

We stirred this up properly this afternoon, and made a wish - you screwed your face up tight, and wished for snow on Christmas Eve.

The recipe comes from a rather battered page in Sainsbury's magazine, November 2007.

You'll need:

315g butter
340ml apple juice
295g dates, chopped
1 medium cooking apple (about 300g), peeled, cored and grated
350g raisins
315g sultanas
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
150g plain flour
150g ground almonds
lots of freshly grated nutmeg
zest of 1 orange and 1 lemon

First of all, stick the oven on at about 150 degrees C.

Then get out a fairly large saucepan (you're going to be boiling up all the dried fruit in it, so it needs to be pretty big), and melt the butter with the apple juice. It'll look very strange...

Stir in the dates, apple, raisins and sultanas, bring to the boil, and simmer for 5 minutes or so. Then comes the fun bit - tip everything into a (large) mixing bowl, and add the bicarb. Once you mix it in, it'll fizz enthusiastically for a while - guaranteed to amuse small children.

Leave everything to cool for 5-10 minutes. Add the flour, ground almonds and nutmeg, and beat until it's all thoroughly combined. Grate in the lemon and orange zest and you're done!

Stick in a large tin (at least 20cm/8in round and 9cm/3.5in deep). This year we've tried a star-shaped silicon tin, rather than having to bother with all that wrapping in baking paper. It seemed to work and was much less faff. (If you haven't got a silicon tin then you'll need to line the tin with baking paper, and also wrap a double layer of paper around the tin itself before it goes in the oven). Lay a sheet of baking paper on the top, otherwise the cake will turn too brown.

Bake for 2.5 hours - it's done when a skewer or long thin pointy thing inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave to cool in the tin, then turn out onto a baking rack.

If you're going to eat it straightaway, dust with some icing sugar, and go off in search of some Wensleydale cheese. If you're keeping it until Christmas, wrap in greaseproof paper, then foil, and place in a tin. You could feed it a little rum/brandy at intervals if you feel like it.