A Spot of Bother with Cake

So, it's been years since I've made a non-gluten free Christmas cake - about seven.  This year, because of "the Cure" I am able to eat wheat so I decided to give it a try.  Oh dear!  Who would have thought it was so hard to bake WITH gluten! I know, I know, most people have difficulty baking without gluten - I had to be different.

I used a trusty recipe from The Destitute Gourmet who is my favourite New Zealand food writer.  Her recipes always work - except this time.  Actually, no it wasn't that the recipe didn't work, I think it was that I just had forgotten how to do it!

The recipe said cook for 2 1/2 hours which I did, religiously checking on it every 30 minutes.  By the time it was cooked in the middle, the edges were burned so it had to get a trim - sides and bottom.  You can see in the photo, it's still a little brown on top.  The only thing that saved the top was that I put a sheet of brown paper over it half way through the cooking time.  I thought I'd sample a piece and, OH MY, it was dry.  So, once a day for the next three days I poured copious amounts of alcohol over the cake.  This actually made it quite nice but it's still a little dry.  To be fair, my oven does cook hot and I forgot this when I was cooking the cake.

After this not so glamourous start to the festive season (yes, I'm way behind schedule this year), I decided to go back to my known and trusted gluten free Christmas cake recipe.  It never fails me.  You can see the mini cakes in the background.  I always do these for friends for Christmas (hope none of them are reading this!).  You can read about them here.

If you want some recipes for Christmas baking (wheat ones) you might want to check out Sweet Embellishments blog - check out that icing. I hope that your Christmas cake turned out better than mine.  Merry Christmas everyone.