Christmas Cake

Name: Christmas Cake
Yield: Serves 8-10
Ingredients: 1¼ cups (300 ml) whole milk; 3 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons (60 g) golden syrup; ¾ cup (170 g) unsalted butter, at room temperature; 1¾ cups (225 g) flour; 1 tablespoon skinned sweet apricot kernels, very finely chopped; 2 tablespoons blanched whole almonds, coarsely chopped; ¼ lb (115 g) candied citrus peel, chopped; 1 lb (450 g) dried currants; 2 eggs; Brandy or whisky, for drizzling; ¾ cup (170 g) firmly packed dark brown sugar

Preparation info

Serves
8-10

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

The Official Downton Abbey Christmas Cookbook

By Regula Ysewijn

Published 2020

About

The term Christmas cake first appears in England in the nineteenth century. Before then, recipes for this type of cake in cookery books were simply titled “a good cake,” “a good cake for Christmas,” or just fruitcake or plum cake. These early cakes were never iced.

The first iced Christmas cake appears on the twelfth day of Christmas under the name Twelfth cake. Popular from the mideighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, it was more bread-like than cake-like, was not as ric