Making your own wedding cake?

yumyums

I've got a recipe for a really easy and nice moist rich fruit cake if anyone's interested. I've tried it and it's delicious - I used Sainsbury's dark rum in mine as it was cheap. Please excuse the slightly odd quantities as I had to scale them from another recipe.

The cake can be made up to 6 months in advance. I've made mine 3 months early and I'm going to keep 'feeding' it up until I'm ready to decorate it.

The quantities below are for deep, round tins.



Instructions:

Line the sides and bottoms of the tins with two layers of baking paper. Wrap the outside of the tin in newspaper and tie with twine. (As the cakes have to be baked for a long time this prevents them from burning / drying out on the outside).

Put the sultanas, raisins, currants, mixed peel, quartered glace cherries, mixed spice, juice and zest of the lemons & oranges, and the rum into a saucepan and bring to the boil (covered). Once boiling, turn off the heat and leave to cool. When cool, all the liquid should have been absorbed into the fruit and it should be nice and plump.

Cream together the butter (room temperature), treacle, and dark brown sugar. Gradually beat in the eggs and then stir in the sifted flour. Stir in the fruit mixture.

Bake at 140 degrees for 2 hours (6 inch), 3 - 3 1/2 hours (8 inch) or 4 hours (10 inch). Place the cakes on a thick layer of newspaper when baking. When near to the required time, test with a skewer / knife. Cakes are done when it comes out clean.

When out of the oven you can pour over a little more alcohol if required. When cool remove from tins and wrap the cakes in clingfilm. Store in a cool, dry place.

As you shouldn't open the oven before the cake is mostly cooked it's not really possible to bake them at the same time but I'm not sure you'd even want to. It was hard to find a bowl big enough to mix the 10 inch mixture in and the fruit had to boiled in a stockpot!

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editied as my spreadsheet came out completely wrong so I had to post as an image

yumyums

Just some pictures of my playing around...





It's my first attempt at a wired gumpaste flower but so I need to work on perfecting it. Also only had a couple of colours to hand so I don't really like how the colouring turned out - would like it to be more vibrant! This is not really what I want my wedding cake to look like either. Haven't finalised the design but I'm just playing around with a few ideas beforehand.

floss2

I think that looks lovely! I spoke to our cake lady last weekend and she has made our fruit cake already, for September...and it will be fed every fortnight :beer: