to be a bit chuffed that I have just made my first Christmas cake?

[grovel]

Shame I waited until my DS is 20 but there we are.

Well done, are you going to feed it alcohol over the next few weeks?

YANBU, well done!

Oh yes. Armagnac.

Ooh, which recipe? Was it a sleb chef one, or a family recipe?

I love making Christmas cake it is my official start to the festive season

It's my first year making my own cake as well. Usually my DMum does mine but decided I want to do it myself this year. Now just the icing left to do.

well done, just make sure you feed it with plenty of alchol over the next few weeks.

Delia.

Do I feed it daily? Weekly? Delia just says "from time to time". Can it be overfed?

Well done Now you have to not eat it for over a month. I predict some picking of the icing before dec 25

grovel if the bottom of the cake tin is an inch deep in brandy - it's overfed. If it's all in the cake, you're good.

Well done! The first Christmas cake I made by myself as a grown up I managed to burn to a crisp. 'twas Delia's recipe too!

I'm another who uses Delia's recipe (with a few tweaks of my own). As to feeding it, I've graduated to being very heavy handed generous with the brandy at the fruit soaking stage and don't feed. I find this gives a more mellow flavour. If you feed regularly, you are adding fresh alcohol every time which doesn't mature so well especially if you use cheap brandy like me.

Just chop the burnt bits off you've still got a great cake.

You may as well feed it catfood, cheaper and when the entire family rejects it at least you can feed it to the cat

Me too, mine burned as well! Way befiore the time allowed as well - I could smell burning about an houer before Delia said it would be ready. I'm almost certain my oven temp is correct, too :(

I was worried about over feeding mine, it's not swimming yet so I presume it is ok after I spilt the bottle over I last week!

TeamEdward - did you cover the top with greaseproof paper?
I've just cooked using Delias recipe, oven at 140C, top covered, 50p size hole cut in top, cooked for 4.45h, and it isn't burnt (not meaning to sound smug!).

Can you save it by cutting the burnt bits off and eating them with custard yum!

Mine burned where the 50p hole was as well...

TeamEdward - of course it would! It's quite normal to trim a cake to level it before decorating, anyhow, or even chop it into assorted sized pieces if you're not decorating it as a round cake. Christmas cake is generally fruit glued together with a bit of cake, anyhow, so nothing untoward will happen to it if you trim it before feeding (and you don't want the burnt taste to be soaked into the rest of it anyhow!)

As a rule, by the way, I check cakes about 3/4 of the way through their cooking time, unless it's a particularly delicate sponge or something.

I've got mine in the oven at the moment. I usually do a Delia cake, but I've done a good Housekeeping one, this time. My mum's made it a few times and it's really lovely - and the fruit's boiled in about 1/4 bottle of brandy before mixing, so it's got all the moisture and boozy taste without being too strong for the kids!

TeamEdward

I burned Delia's the first time I made it, so after that I checked it after three hours and that did the trick. I bake two every year and they're always lovely, I feed them every week to make sure they taste good.

I've also made Deel's Creole Christmas Cake a few times, it has to be the most boozy, gorgeous, deliciously tasting fruit cake I have ever, ever eaten in my life.

I think the problem with the Delia recipe is that she makes a big thing about not checking the cake before four hours are up (or something - cant remember the exact timing). I had an oven thermometer so temp was right, but the oven was quite small and the cake was totally and utterly burned after four hours, despite the brown paper collar, etc. Three hours would probably have done it. I did trim it after DH fished it out of the bin where i had flung it in a rage and the cake, albeit smaller than expected, tasted fine in the end.

Anyway since the Delia debacle I have returned to the recipe in my mum's old Marks and Spencer cake recipe book, which has never failed us in over twenty years. It's great as it gives the quantities and times in metric and imperial for all shapes and sizes of tin.

I made mine 3 weeks ago and haven't fed it bugger all as of yet.

I guessed the alcohol amount by pouring too much in so I figured it was ok for a wee while.

Hmm.