Cakes for Christmas
By Katherine Campion
Each recipe has been tested for you
CHRISTMAS comes but once a year, and when it comes, it brings—cakes! Cakes large and cakes small, cakes ethereal and cakes substantial; gold, silver, and plum cakes, cakes hidden by delicate white or pink or brown frostings, and cakes left exactly as they come from the oven with their rich, sugary, and entrancingly crisp crust unadorned; seed cakes and chocolate cakes and cookies; loaf cakes and layer cakes and cup cakes, to say nothing of the hundred-and-one other varieties of sugar and spice which go to the making of a merry Christmas cake.
Let us be thankful that this year we may make our holiday sweets without worrying ourselves greatly about the price of sugar; and that butter is not quite so costly as it was a year or so ago. Furthermore, I find that many of the little accessories which make these fête day goodies so attractive are once more to be had in the shops—angelica, pistachio nuts, silver dragées, currants, and all the rest. As to your flour, it is best to have some very nice pastry flour for your Christmas cakes; it will cost a little more, I grant, but then Christmas comes but once a year, you know! And while you are going in for a bit of extravagance, just make the cakes of butter, instead of using any of the excellent commercial fats or butter substitutes, for butter has a flavor of its own that is hard to equal, though I must admit that the cakes will be good even if the ordinary flour and margarin are used in their making. If an unsalted butter substitute is used, be sure to add plenty of salt to the batter.
Naturally, when Christmas cakes are mentioned, it is the fruit cake which comes to one's mind first of all, and though I do not think there is quite the old-time demand for the rich cake, black with spices and heavy with fruits, that was once so popular, still many housewives like to make at least one of these cakes a year, if only for the sake of tradition. The baking of the fruit cake is always the difficult part of its making, for it is not easy to keep the oven heat sufficiently low, especially where the quick fuel stoves are being used, to give the cake its required number of hours in it. An oven thermometer is an aid to this end, and a cake baked in a fireless cooker usually attains the same quality and texture as the cakes baked in the old-time brick ovens, but where there is no such medium at hand I have found it a satisfactory plan to steam the cake for three hours or even longer, if it is a very large one, then to finish it off by giving it an hour in the oven at a temperature of 300° F.
As to the recipe for the Fruit Cake, here is one that is quite rich enough for almost any occasion. Cream together three-fourths of a pound of butter and a pound of moist brown sugar, adding one teaspoonful each of ground cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and mace, and one-half teaspoonful of nutmeg; then stir in the grated rind of one lemon and add, one at a time, without beating them, eight eggs. Beat the mixture well after each egg has been whipped into it, and after all are in, beat again for at least ten minutes. Sift together five cupfuls of pastry flour, one teaspoonful of soda, and one-half teaspoonful of salt. Wash and dry thoroughly two pounds of currants, chop two pounds of seeded raisins, and shave half a pound of citron very fine. Stir one cupful of dark molasses into the butter and sugar mixture, then add the flour very gradually, using a portion of it to dredge the fruit. When half the flour is incorporated into the batter, begin adding the fruit, also one cupful each of chopped walnuts and pecans; add also one-half cupful of orange juice and the same quantity of grape juice. Beat the batter hard when all the ingredients have been stirred into it, and bake in large loaf-cake pans which have been well-greased and floured or paper-lined. Bake four hours at 275° F. or steam and bake as mentioned above.
Make this cake several weeks in advance, leaving its icing and ornamentation until the day before Christmas. Put it away in a large stone crock and tuck a good, sound apple beside it; this will keep it moist and help to flavor it even more deliciously.