Let them eat cake!

Merry Christmas, seasonal greeting and all that Jazz readers. I'm back visiting the family and thought a nice cake recipe would be perfect for this time of excess and over indulgence.

Firstly take 1kg of dried fruit mix and chuck in a bowl with a sprinkling of glacé cherries and mixed peel and soak over night (up to 24 hours, the longer, the better) in either port, sherry or brandy or if you're some kind of weirdo you can just use orange juice.

The fruit mix after its soaking in Port for 24 hours plus some lime marmalade

Take 400g of unsalted butter out of the fridge and leave it out for half an hour so it's soft and then cut it into small junks in a bowl then add a mixture of fine brown sugar and caster sugar (400g in total) to the butter and mix together.

Left: Mix the sugar and butter together...

Right: ...to make a thick batter.

Whilst you have your glamourous assistant mixes the sugar and the butter weigh out 110g of ground almonds and then add 350g of plain flour. Then create a well in the butter sugar batter and crack the contents of a large egg into it (crack open the egg into a mug first so you can fish out any bits of shell which finds its way in there) and add a heaped spoonful of the flour and almond mix and then mix together. Do this process with four more large eggs and then tip in the remaining flour and almond mix and mix thoroughly.

The egg in a well in the middle of the sugar/butter mix with a heaped spoonful of the plain flour/ground almond mix.

Now add the soaked fruit and any of the booze it was soaked in that wasn't absorbed and mix thoroughly. If the batter is the right consistency your should be able to scoop up a spoonful and which when turned upside should fall back into the bowl in fat lumps. If the batter is too dry it will stick to the spoon (slowly add more booze mixing thoroughly until the consistency is correct) and if it's too wet it will dribble off the spoon (slowly add more flour mixing thoroughly until the consistency is just right).

The completed cake batter.

Then spoon the cake batter into two deep, 8 inch diameter cake tins (you know the ones, they have a separate bottom bit) and decorate with blanched almonds. Then place in a preheated oven at 150 degrees Celsius for approximately an hour and a half until golden brown and cooked through.

Left: Ready for the oven!

Right: Put the cakes into a preheated oven at 150 degrees Celsius.

You've probably noticed that I used two loaf tins instead of a second round cake tin and that's because my mother doesn't have a second round cake tin so we used a loaf tin instead. Here below are the finished articles...

Happy baking and I hope to see you back here in the new year!

Tory! Tory! Tory!

I was baking mince pies with Charlie Cat and, that incurable Frenchman, Dom and we'd just sat down in front of the TV whilst the pies baked. Kirstie Allsopp was on and I commented that I thought her attractive but that she was a terrible tory. Both Dom and Charlie looked at me with a look of confusion so I went on to explain that the national press had suggested she'd become one of Cameron's babes. These women are a thinly veiled attempt to make the Tory party look less like a party of sexist, adulterous bores. 

Kirstie Allsopp: a beautiful woman and a terrible Tory

Charlie then dropped the bomb shell when she said, "but I thought you were a Tory..." I reeled from that comment spluttering and stuttering before finally recovering and confirming to them that I'm not Tory.

I grew up under Thatcher and Major and my conditioning started young with seeing my father hurling abuse at the telly whenever Thatcher's smug face appeared on the screen before leaping up and turning the TV off entirely. Thatcher angered my father that much and it puts me in mind of a quote by the infamous Frankie Boyle who when asked to comment on whether Thatcher should get a state funeral said, "most of us aren't interested in what type of funeral she [Thatcher] should have, we're all debating whether she has to be dead before we can bury her!" It wasn't just my father either, local politicians also had a role to play in building my hatred of the Tories. The local council in my home town when I was growing up was Conservative, true blue through and through and as a result of that had changed from a vibrant market town into a dead dormitory town. They were inept, spineless and greedy, slashing services in the town until there was fuck all left. When I started working in the holidays whilst at University I saw Tory voters close up and it made me hate the Tories even more. Small business owners in my neck of the woods were overwhelmingly Tory and they treated their workforce like shit and temps, like me, were even lower on the food chain. After seeing how those bastards treated their workforce I vowed to join a union as soon as I got a proper job. The Conservative party made me the lefty voter I am today and it will be a cold day in hell before I vote blue. Really I find this all too difficult to put into words but I think this sketch from the early 1990s still runs true today...