Now that Halloween is cold in its grave, it’s that time of year again. You know: spending the next month tutting whenever you hear Christmas music while becoming increasingly excited that Christmas is coming.
This year is particularly exciting as, for the first time, my partner and I are not spending it with either of our families but are instead staying at home. I haven’t quite decided what to make for pudding yet, but I decided to get in the spirit by having a first attempt at Delia’s Irish whiskey Christmas cakes.
This is a recipe that requires something of a run-up. In order to get the flavours right, it must be stored in the fridge for seven days, where the mixture of whiskey, Angostura bitters, raisins, currants and almonds has to be given time to mature along with your growing irritation at the large box now taking up space in your fridge to house this delicious cake.
At least, that’s the theory. I ran into a few problems with this recipe – not least that the first time around the lag between making a hash of the recipe, and then discovering this, made it difficult to remember what, exactly, I had done wrong. I advise taking notes on the first couple of run-throughs.
Delia’s recipe uses nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves. My advice is to buy the right amounts fresh to make this cake, unless you prefer the prospect of Stephen’s Overwhelming Clove and Whiskey cake to Delia’s mellower, authentic version.
My second difficulty came with the whiskey itself. I’ve always wanted to persuade myself to like whiskey, as it always looks terribly sophisticated in movies, but I have yet to succeed – other than in cakes, where I like it a great deal.
As I didn’t much fancy shelling out for a particularly high-quality bottle of the stuff, I went low-budget. (I’m ashamed to admit that my preparation for this recipe consisted of googling “cheap Irish whiskey” and buying a bottle for a tenner.)
I found that the resulting cake still tasted a little too strongly of whiskey – and cloves of course. It tasted like someone’s mouth after an evening of cheap booze and mince pies – so if you’ve ever had an ill-advised hookup at a Christmas party, and wanted to recreate the experience in cake form, I have an excellent recipe for you.
My advice is to slightly under-dose on the whiskey in Delia’s recipe, who I imagine went for a rather better bottle than I did. That, or buy better whiskey.
The finished product is meant to look like an elegantly wrapped parcel, which – if you remove the word “elegantly” – mine does.
The finished product a la Delia looks like the presents you buy that are gift-wrapped in-store. My finished product looks like a present wrapped by an enthusiastic child – very possibly a child who has been helping themselves to the whiskey.
To hold it all together, Delia uses marzipan as a joining agent. I am aware that marzipan is a divisive foodstuff – some people think it’s disgusting – and I am happy to report that there are three ways around this.
The first is to make more of the apricot jam and whiskey mixture and use that to hold it together. The second is to use regular icing.
The third – and my preferred option – is to turn the page to Delia’s recipe for Irish tea bread, which I made out of curiosity while waiting for the cake mixture to mature. It’s simple, delicious – and to me, really tastes like Christmas.
- Stephen Bush’s task is to cook his way through Delia’s Complete How To Cook (BBC Books, £40) in a year.
- You can watch Delia Smith’s free Online Cookery School videos at deliaonline.com; @deliaonline
