How to make a wedding cake - Mad'n'Rob stylee
1) Choose your recipe - we're using Queen Delia's Creole Christmas cake but with added booze. We made a few at Christmas and they passed the taste-test-challenge.
2) Calculate the quantities of ingredients needed. We were going to do 15 times the given quanity, but decided that may be a bit excessive; we're now using 10 times the amount Queen Delia uses.
3) Soak the fruit in booze, spices and sugar; then leave in a fridge for five days.
Find one monster pan...
...add lots of booze...
...some spices...
...and lots of fruit.
Simmer on a very gentle heat for 15 minutes, or until you can no longer be bothered to wait for the liquid to get to simmering point because the flame is so gentle.
4) Five days later (and ideally more), invade the kitchen in the school's boarding house to use their industrial mixer. It's a whopper of a piece of kitchen machinery, but would still only fit half the cake mix at a time. Curses. We ended up making two batches of mixture.
For each batch, take some eggs and butter...
...add some dry ingredients...
...and the soaked fruit.
Use the whopper mixer and get very excited about the possibility of owning our own Kenwood Chef. Discuss the etiquette involved in buying our own wedding presents - would it be wrong to get our Kenwood now, or should we wait until we're actually married? After all, there are still many weeks left for Rob to come to his senses and dump me.
While the gunk is mixing, double line the tins. I love baking parchment. It's one of my most favourite baking things. (Until we own a Kenwood Chef, of course)
Each batch would have to fill two caketins, so we scientifically measured it out (in a way that would have real scientists spinning in their graves) using the "one for you, one for me" principle. This technique requires you to scoop the mix from bowl...
...and into tin one. Then repeat, scooping the mix into tin two. Repeat ad infinitum. Then lick spatula (once all scooping, poking, proding and smoothing is done - basic food hygiene is important and not to be sniffed at)
After both batches of mixture are made up, line the tins on the oven and marvel at the difference in colour between the two batches. It might be something to do with one batch getting a longer mixing, or having slightly more fruit, or having the fruit added in two goes instead of ten goes, or.... there's a whole realm of cake-experiemental-baking just waiting to be discovered.
5) After three hours cooking, cover the cakes with a double thickness of baking parchment while snorting the smell of cooking fruitcake. Check every 20 minutes after that until the first one cooks. Remove it from oven. Feel smug.
6) Once all cakes out of oven, leave them in their tins for 45 minutes then turn onto wire trays to finish cooling. Tick "make wedding cake" off to-do list.
2) Calculate the quantities of ingredients needed. We were going to do 15 times the given quanity, but decided that may be a bit excessive; we're now using 10 times the amount Queen Delia uses.
3) Soak the fruit in booze, spices and sugar; then leave in a fridge for five days.
Find one monster pan...
...add lots of booze...
...some spices...
...and lots of fruit.
Simmer on a very gentle heat for 15 minutes, or until you can no longer be bothered to wait for the liquid to get to simmering point because the flame is so gentle.
4) Five days later (and ideally more), invade the kitchen in the school's boarding house to use their industrial mixer. It's a whopper of a piece of kitchen machinery, but would still only fit half the cake mix at a time. Curses. We ended up making two batches of mixture.
For each batch, take some eggs and butter...
...add some dry ingredients...
...and the soaked fruit.
Use the whopper mixer and get very excited about the possibility of owning our own Kenwood Chef. Discuss the etiquette involved in buying our own wedding presents - would it be wrong to get our Kenwood now, or should we wait until we're actually married? After all, there are still many weeks left for Rob to come to his senses and dump me.
While the gunk is mixing, double line the tins. I love baking parchment. It's one of my most favourite baking things. (Until we own a Kenwood Chef, of course)
Each batch would have to fill two caketins, so we scientifically measured it out (in a way that would have real scientists spinning in their graves) using the "one for you, one for me" principle. This technique requires you to scoop the mix from bowl...
...and into tin one. Then repeat, scooping the mix into tin two. Repeat ad infinitum. Then lick spatula (once all scooping, poking, proding and smoothing is done - basic food hygiene is important and not to be sniffed at)
After both batches of mixture are made up, line the tins on the oven and marvel at the difference in colour between the two batches. It might be something to do with one batch getting a longer mixing, or having slightly more fruit, or having the fruit added in two goes instead of ten goes, or.... there's a whole realm of cake-experiemental-baking just waiting to be discovered.
5) After three hours cooking, cover the cakes with a double thickness of baking parchment while snorting the smell of cooking fruitcake. Check every 20 minutes after that until the first one cooks. Remove it from oven. Feel smug.
6) Once all cakes out of oven, leave them in their tins for 45 minutes then turn onto wire trays to finish cooling. Tick "make wedding cake" off to-do list.
posted by Mad at 2:44 PM
2 Comments:
Old kenwood chefs are great, my mum's bounced once on the kitchen floor (granny caused); it still worked although the bowl had a bit broken on an edge. It finally died after about 20 odd years and she now has a Magimix (I think, square base likes to dance with bread dough mixing). Mind you I don't think the new ones bounce on a (concrete) floor and still work afterwards.
Hmm should I mention with the use of fruit cake in it (after all prob similar consitency) that we used to mix our concrete for labs at uni in an industrial food mixer? ... the bowl was a bit more dinged than the one in your pic.
.. is that laughing at the cakes, or the conistency of the mixture?
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