Your Special Cake

I made it.

That Christmas cake I promised.

It’s actually a long story and not so much about “easy cooking” — hey, that depends on the perspective. What do you call “easy cooking”? Something you can do quickly or something you don’t need to worry about? To me, personally, it’s the latter.

I don’t always cook “quickly”. Quick cooking was a permanent part of my life in my Master’s year abroad when I lived in the UK and shared a kitchen with 8 other people, none of whom had previous experience of cleaning after themselves. Going into the kitchen was like entering a swamp. I also had plenty of space in the fridge: quarter of a shelf. It could probably hold a package of cheese (and a bowl with yoghurt if I was in a mood to play tetris). That’s what it contained in reality. You can cook a lot with cheese. Melted cheese. Grated cheese. Grilled cheese. Cheese cut in cubes. Cheese a la naturelle.

So — as you can already guess — cooking in my last ever student year was based on a “single meal at a time” concept. I couldn’t possibly store anything for a few days. The challenge of getting something warm and relatively healthy done in 20 min (without supervision) created many wonderful dishes during that year.

Christmas cake isn’t one of them.

First thing you need to do when you are about to cook a Christmas cake is relax. Really. I had a headache (I can still taste and smell stuff, phew!) and all my best intentions to spend the entire working day staring at my laptop’s screen and saving humanity ended nowhere. So I closed my laptop and went to cook.

What do we need?

In essence, whatever we have. We do need some dough and some nice extras to create that sense of winter magic.

Let’s focus on the dough. We want something simple and healthy. So, wholemeal flour, sour milk (kefir, buttermilk), oil/butter to make it soft and something to raise it (soda or baking powder).

I can never decide between oil and butter when it comes to baking cakes. So I add both. For 300–350 g flour, 4 tablespoons fat is more than enough, you can split them the way you like between butter and refined vegetable oil.

I can also never decide between soda and baking powder when I cook with sour milk. Both will react with the dough and raise it, both are way better than yeast (when used in moderation). So I add both. Two teaspoons baking powder and half teaspoon soda.

We have the dough! We need to make it sweet. I prefer honey to sugar — and I never put too much. We can use additional natural sweeteners, such as raisins, other dried fruit, or even cinnamon (it creates an illusion of sweetness) at a later stage. Some vanilla flavour is never bad in a cake. In moderation too, obviously.

So, here comes the later stage. We need to make the cake interesting. Just dig out everything you have in your fridge and cupboard. I digged out the following items: grated and pressed carrots (extra juice goes to the children if they drink it, unlike mine), raisins, candied orange peels (candied them myself a week ago), crushed almonds, a bit of lemon zest, cinnamon, ground pepper (yes, just a little bit to spice it up).

And you can also do a glazing. Or not. Google any glazing your tummy desires. There’s so much advice online. My tummy desired a glazing based on butter, sugar and lemon juice. Not particularly dietary but good news is that you need a very-very thin layer on the cake to make a difference.

I also candied some kumquats in the morning to decorate the top, but you can use your imagination and decorate it with whatever you have at hand.

So, to recap.

Step 1. Decide on the dough.

Step 2. Decide on the filling.

Step 3. Decide on the glazing.

Here is the sequence then.

1. Pour sour milk (300–400 ml for 300–350 g flour, I will never give you precise proportions, sorry) into a bowl, add soda, let it rest.
2. Heat oil with butter (or whatever your choice is). Add honey or sugar (3 full tablespoons), let it mix in the pane and heat up. Don’t boil it, take off the heat once they’ve mixed properly.
3. Add oil mixture to your sour milk. Use a mixer or mix by hand. Add a package of vanilla sugar (8g size) if you decided to use it (I recommend to).
4. Add flour (and baking powder if you chose to use it). I also added carrots at this point.
5. Put away your mixer and stir with a spoon the rest of ingredients into the dough. In my case: raisins, nuts, cinnamon, peels, pepper, zest.
6. That’s it, actually. Heat the oven (180 degrees will do). Take a baking form (or two), butter them from inside, pour the dough, spread evenly. Make sure you leave some space for the dough to raise. It will raise very well.
7. Bake. Until brown crust and a dry wooden stick. Took me 20–25 min.
8. Now, the glazing. In a pane, heat 1 tablespoon of butter, ca. 50 g of brown sugar and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Increase the proportions if you just looove glazing. Once they’ve all melted together, pour the liquid into a bowl and mix it at high speed until it magically turns into glazing. That’s it.
9. Spread the glazing on the cake’s surface, you don’t have to be too generous, just make sure it spreads evenly. Decorate it with dried fruit or candied fruit or anything else that comes to mind.

It’s delicious and can do wonders for you. It can be a Christmas cake. A Birthday cake. An Easter cake. A Summer cake. A Thanksgiving cake. A New Year cake. Your special cake.