CAKE'S A GO!

What a beautiful day!  Gorgeous sunshine and blue skies.  I've got lovely Ina Garten on the laptop to keep me company and I'm putting my Christmas cake together.

As I said yesterday, I'm making Nigella's chocolate fruit cake. I didn't have any coffee liqueur, so used two teaspoons of  coffee to 125 ml of water as a substitute.

Now this is going to be a bit experimental because I'm going to cook it in the Aga without a cake baker, as I don't have one.  Aga recommend using one for this type of cake, but as they are expensive and I don't tend to make this type of cake very often,  I don't see the point in forking out for one. I couldn't find anyone on the internet who'd done this before,  so fingers crossed.

I have to say, it's a very easy cake, you just chuck everything except the flour, ground almonds, raising agents and eggs into a large pan, bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes. Then you leave it to cool for 30 minutes, add the remaining ingredients and bake for 1.5 hours.

As you can see, I printed out the recipe, as I find it easier if it's right in front of me and I can tick off ingredients as I add them (I get easily distracted).

After looking at how the Aga cake baker works, I fashioned my own using a large, lidded stainless steel heavy bottomed pan and a trivet from an old pressure cooker.  Once I'd put the mixture into a lined, spring-form  8" cake tin, I heated the pan in the Aga, then put the cake into it and popped the lid on.  I used a recipe from my Mary Berry Aga cook book that was vaguely similar and stated a cooking time of 1.5 hours.  After one hour I took it out and poked it with a skewer...very raw. We then took the dogs for a walk and by the time we got back, it had been in the oven for 2 hours. When I took the lid off, I felt it might have been in too long and I should have stuck to the 1.5 hours.

It's supposed to have a sticky looking top, which mine doesn't. It did the first time I checked it, so maybe taking the lid off prematurely messed that up a bit. Nigella also says it should still be slightly gooey in the middle, again, mine wasn't. But not bad for a first attempt, so I'm really chuffed.

The weird looking thing it's sitting on is the parchment liner I used. I peeled it off the sides but as it was still rather warm, I thought better of taking it off completely until cooled.

!