{"id":92,"date":"2007-12-06T13:22:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-06T13:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/?p=92"},"modified":"2007-12-06T13:22:00","modified_gmt":"2007-12-06T13:22:00","slug":"christmas-cake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/?p=92","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Cake."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For today&#8217;s advent-calendar-image, I present the results of The Kitchen Carnage previously featured here: My Christmas Cake. Would that I had an Easiwork to make the construction of ambitious cuisine more, well, <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">easy<\/span>.<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"width: 360px; height: 270px;\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2020\/2090508879_edba0fec95.jpg?w=950\" \/><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: left;\">The camera doesn&#8217;t lie; my cake really did turn out as black as soot. It is a very fruit-heavy recipe; after 2 days of soaking the fruit, citrus zest, lemon and orange juice, amaretto, brandy, spices and black pepper, the flour, margarine, sugar and eggs are added. It is then slow-baked in the oven for 2 and 3\/4 hours or until a skewer comes out clean.<\/p>\n<p>Friends, there never was a clean skewer. So after 2 hours in the oven on gas mark 2, I reduced the heat down to the S setting (what does that S stand for, anyway?) and left it in overnight. In the morning, there was still no gleaming skewer. However, the cake had turned a very dark shade of black and curiously, is not in the least bit burnt in spite of appearances; it never smelled burnt and the bits I sampled to check were not in the least burnt. I did cover it with foil; maybe long, slow cooking with foil on top of them turns cakes a very dark shade? So I cooked it for a further 2 and a half hours on gas mark 2. Poking it with a skewer *still* wouldn&#8217;t produce clean results, but I gave up, deciding it was hot enough and had been in the oven long enough to be thoroughly cooked. I doused the entire thing in further alcohol (rum and amaretto again) and here it is, ready to mature for a couple of weeks in baking parchment and foil.<\/p>\n<p>It smells and tastes rather like a Christmas pudding and in spite of its long tenure in the oven, it utterly moist and crumbly. I think I may have inadvertently made a Christmas Pudding in the shape of a cake&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;the black pepper, amaretto and cranberries were my own special variants on the original instructions though it does appear to have made the cake a little bit hot and spicy! I&#8217;ll let you know how it goes and if it is a success I will post the recipe here.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For today&#8217;s advent-calendar-image, I present the results of The Kitchen Carnage previously featured here: My Christmas Cake. Would that I had an Easiwork to make the construction of ambitious cuisine more, well, easy. The camera doesn&#8217;t lie; my cake really did turn out as black as soot. It is a very fruit-heavy recipe; after 2 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pmise-1u","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thedomesticsoundscape.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}