English muffins and cupcakes have now gained extraordinary popularity that a rare recipe notebook does without a description of a successful option. Today we will prepare an English Christmas cake according to the traditional recipe.
You will need:
- 60 ml dark rum,
- 1/2 pack of butter
- brown (or white) sugar - 125 g,
- 2 whole chicken eggs and 1 yolk,
- vanilla 1 pod,
- premium flour 200 g,
- 50 g white raisins
- 200 g of black raisins and other dried fruits,
- 30 g of other dried fruits,
- 1 tsp baking powder,
- 1 tbsp cocoa (optional)
- liquid honey.
Preparation of dried fruits
To start preparing a Christmas cake, you need to start with the fact that you should soak dried fruits in alcohol. This is a traditional step in making Christmas muffins.
Take raisins, prunes and dried apricots (or other dried fruits of your choice) and fill them with dark rum. You can take cognac or any other alcohol that you like. Leave it for 15 minutes and start kneading the dough.
Sometimes dried fruits are left to soak in alcohol for up to a week. This is done so that they are completely saturated with alcohol. Subsequently, when the cupcake is infused (and such cupcakes are insisted up to a month), dried fruits will give part of the alcohol to the finished cake and thereby make it wet. This is one of the reasons why Christmas cupcakes last so long.
Dough preparation
So the dough. The oil should be soft. Beat it with sugar until fluffy. This will make the cupcake airy.
Beat 2 whites and 1 yolk separately to soften the dough.
Now add vanilla seeds to this mass. If you don't have a vanilla pod, you can substitute vanilla essence or vanilla sugar instead.
Vanilla pods have a strong aroma, so one pod will be enough. The rest of the pod can be put in a container with sugar and then in a week you will have your own vanilla sugar.
We take the main part of the flour, leaving about two tablespoons for mixing flour with dried fruits.
Mix flour with baking powder, sift and add a little salt. Add spices to this.
There are quite traditional spices for Christmas muffins and cookies. These are usually cinnamon, ginger, ground cloves and ground nutmeg, taken in the proportions that are most pleasing to you. Usually cinnamon predominates, and the rest of the spices are put less.
The total mass of spices is 1.5-2.5 tsp. Combine the oil and dry mixture, mix well.
Now the dough should cool slightly, put it in the refrigerator for 15 minutes. You can immediately turn on the oven at 200 degrees so that it warms up well.
The dough has cooled down, now you can add dried fruits to it. We pour the remaining alcohol into a bowl, then we will saturate the finished product with it. Put the raisins in a bowl and add the remaining small portion of the flour. Mix well. This is done to ensure that the moist raisins are evenly distributed over the dough. Put the raisins in the dough. We also put dried cherries here. It is moist by itself, so it was not soaked in rum, and large dark raisins, which are also very moist in themselves.
A traditional Christmas cake should contain a lot of dried fruit, about the same as the dough itself. When they are fully combined with the dough, you can spread the mass into the mold.
Baking english muffin
Lubricate the form with oil (as a rule, it is a rectangular form) and cover it with special baking paper. We level the mass and send it to the oven.
One trick: after five minutes from the start of baking, the temperature must be reduced to 180 or even 170 degrees.
The cake will stay in the oven for a long time, about an hour, its edges should turn brown, and it itself should be completely dry. When the cake is ready, take it out of the mold and soak it with the remaining alcohol. Alcohol is also saturated with aromas of dried fruits and became aromatic. It can be lubricated hot without waiting for it to cool completely.
Rum-soaked English muffins can last up to one month. To give a glossy surface to the cake, grease it with melted honey. Decorate the cake with nuts, they will stick perfectly to the warm honey, and grease the top with honey again so that the nuts also shine.
Below in the photo - muffins with various combinations of dried fruits and nuts, prepared according to this recipe. We wish you successful kitchen experiments and a Merry Christmas!
Bon appetit and Happy New Year!
