And the recipe for Thangam's tradition busting Christmas Cake

So, having read the previous blog of reasons to make a carry on on Stir Up Sunday (it was last Sunday but don't worry, it's not too late) here is the recipe for the cake. Gather ye dried fruit and nuts and spices and a loose-bottomed 12 inch cake tin and a little one for you to have your own extra cake.

Ingredients

200g butter - take it out an hour before cooking, so it isn't fridge hard.

150g dark muscovado sugar - yes, nothing else will do. It's worth it.

2 tablespoon black treacle - no, golden syrup isn't the same, it's not that sort of cake.

4 eggs, beaten, or kettled. Did I say big respect to the students?

100ml or so of brandy or sherry.

650g dried fruit - I use raisins (not a single sultana will be passing my mother's lips this Christmas, as per instructions), cranberries (dried and sweetened), cherries (the dark sort, not the red ones) and candied peel. But you can add currants and sultanas if you like that sort of thing. Soak everything, except the candied peel, in the brandy/sherry overnight if you can.

120g nuts - I used almonds and hazelnuts. But you can leave them out if you have a nut allergy to cope with.

Finely grated zest of lemon or orange (but never a lime). Now is a good time to get yourself a zester, what a tool.

2tsp mixed spice - I used traditional cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg.

Seeds scraped out of half a fresh vanilla pod if you have one.

200g plain flour

1/2 tsp baking powder.

Method:

Cream butter and sugar thoroughly. Beat in treacle, then eggs, a bit at a time, alternately with the flour.  The mixture should be ploppy, not liquid.  

Add in the fruit/alcohol mixture. Add the nuts. Stir it all well, adding the baking powder.

You should have greased and lined your tin with baking parchment - this is really important. And you should have heated up your oven to 160c or 140c if you have a fan oven, or gas 3.

Ease the cake mixture carefully, just half at first, into the cake tin. Now for a mixing up of traditions - Simnel cake, the traditional cake for Easter, is a fruit cake with a layer of marzipan in the middle. What could be nicer? Roll out some ready made marzipan into a circle which is slightly smaller than the cake tin, place carefully on the cake mixture and add the rest of the cake mixture making sure it covers the marzipan at the edges.

Cook for 30 minutes, then turn down the oven to 150c or 130c if you have a fan oven, or gas 2. Cook for at least 2 hours, perhaps slightly more until a skewer comes out clean except for a bit of marzipan (taste to check!).

Leave it to cool in the tin. Once cool, take out of tin and baking parchment. Turn it upside down, skewer its bottom and splash on the first drink of extra alcohol. It will quickly soak up. Now wrap the whole thing in foil and put in a tin or somewhere else which is safe from rodents or you.

It will keep for months, particularly if no-one else in your family likes fruit cake.

Stir up Sunday - don't KEEP CALM and do make a CARRY-ON

I am not keen on tradition. It's so often used as an excuse for being vile to someone or a group of someones. Some time over the next week, tradition requires ("it's for the children!") that Dutch men will be blacking themselves and their children up, adding rubbery looking red lips and afro wigs to emulate the BlackPete character who is the nasty bad men who beats the children and abducts them to Spain if they are naughty (I am not making this up). Meanwhile, saintly (and coincidentally white) Klaus gives the good ones presents. Have a look at the youtube clip of the warm and witty David Sedaris' take on this tradition for actual footage. Here are some more traditions:


Easter Eggs: a once lovely traditional time of year for celebrating renewal and growth, now small children are given appalling quality chocolate, confusingly hollow and usually empty. I suppose that is a traditional way of giving your kids a metaphor for life (or reality TV).


Weddings: traditional way of enslaving women and their property, of providing for state interference in individual's sex lives and in in most, but not all countries, a form of sexual identity apartheid. Don't go bleating to me about Civil Partnerships, it's one sort of marriage for gay people and another for straights. Netherlands, admirably (feel obliged to mention a positive Dutch tradition) have three forms of union to which anyone of any sexual identity can sign themselves to. But they are basically not my cup of tea. If you want to invite me to one, unless you are a nephew or niece of mine, please don't, though I will of course respect your right to get married. And if you are a n or an n of mine, please be warned I may well just make you a cake and bung you a tenner, with the usual injunction not to spend it all on sweets. Then tell you I am leaving you all my money in my will and not to tell the others.


Right wing governments traditionally come up with convincing sounding narratives for doing really rotten things to poor people, vulnerable people and anyone who doesn't have loads of unearned income, in ways which make many otherwise reasonable people and even some of their victims think "you know,  he does have a point".


Left wing governments traditionally eventually implode under pressure from international capitalism and internal torment, get kicked out and then traditionally annoy their loyal supporters in a range of ways, this time by referring to squeezed middles. I have a squeezed middle. I am also a loyal supporter. Squeezing my middle won't rid me of the unwanted extra 8kilo. But I can identify it. Ed, dear Ed, I voted for you, stop all this talk of middles and squeezing and blank pages and get on hammering the coalition's treatment of poor people, women, people with disabilities and also with working out how to implement the Living Wage like you promised you would.


Austerity governments can traditionally rely on a Royal Wedding as cover for even more nastiness, whilst we revert to forelock tugging commoners, grateful for a souvenir mug and a day off job seeking, failing to notice that even when the Queen says she will pay half, that's OUR MONEY she is spending. And we will also be paying for some in the police to indulge in the now traditional habit of kettling under age enthusiasts on the day. Oh, and traditionally, we will all forget that royal marriages, going back to Henry 8th and before, with a very few exceptions, don't traditionally go that well.

Christmas: bah humbug. Once a way of feasting and warming each other up during the dark cold winter days (good plan now the price of gas seems to have double), now it seems to me to have become a way of using tradition as an excuse for making people feel they have to spend three months' wages on STUFF. People, stop it, we don't have any money and spending money we don't have just because bankers want us to is why we are in this mess! Go home and knit some socks. Or order a goat from Oxfam- my kind mother has given me practically a flock over the years and I love them all (thankfully, Oxfam has sent them to live with someone who actually knows about goat husbandry).

So it is with some surprise that I realise that I have a deep and abiding love for one, a Christmas, tradition. Stir up Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent is the day to make the plum pudding. I have made it the day to make the Christmas cake, which I adore. Sticky, dark, studded with plump raisins sodden with brandy, it's a nutritious and balanced meal which travels well and lasts for months, particularly if you remember that it has a thirst and will be happier if you give it ever more brandy every few days.  There is a lot of time involved in the stirring, cooking slowly and then feeding it over the weeks between the cooking and the big day itself. But that gives you time to watch Mad Men and knit more socks (you can learn how to knit on youtube you know). As you trudge the lonely road on a donkey to the source of your birth, don't forget to ring her up to let her know you have packed a blanket, a fully charged phone and map not a SatNav (who knew that maps would help more in a snowstorm than Sean Connery's voice in an electronic box? No possibility of answering that without sarcasm so I will just park it). And before you set off, wrap the cake up well, remember it will add substantially to your weight allowance if you are flying and if you get snowed up, it will provide you with all essential nutrients for longer than your phone battery will last.

Love in the room, Christmas stirred. And you can cook a big daddy of a cake and a little small one, just for you.

Recipe follows on next blog page.....