“Hope you don’t mind… but I’ve… um… volunteered you to make a cake,” my friend Caz said.

It turned out that Caz had managed to draw the short straw of organising the “Guess the weight of the cake” competition for her school PTA Christmas Fair, and feeling somewhat panicked at the idea of doing the cake herself had volunteered me for the job.  Not that I minded, of course.  Cakes and me are best friends.

Christmas always equals fruit cakes, so my favourite “simmer and stir” recipe was a given.  Christmas puddings are always popular, too, so I decided to combine the two and make a Christmas Pudding shaped Christmas Cake!  Simples!

To make the appropriate shape, I baked the cake in a 2L Pyrex bowl.  I would have loved to bake it in a pudding basin, but I don’t have one and was very shocked to discover that they cost almost £10 in Sainsburys!!  Lining the bowl was pretty tedious to say the least.  I broke out a tape measure and measured the internal height of the bowl, along the curved side if that makes sense and then cut a sheet of parchment 6 inches bigger so that it would have sufficient height in case of unexpected rising.

All you need to do next is butter the bowl, press the parchment into it and then make a series of cuts down the paper leaving an untouched circle about 2″ wide in the middle of the bowl.  I made cuts every inch or so and tucked and pressed the parchment in place.  After a lot of grumbling I ended up with a beautifully lined bowl and very buttery fingers.  I also completely forgot to take a picture of this masterpiece—sorry!

Make the cake as usual but decrease the oven temperature by 5C because glass conducts heat very well.  I took no chances and placed the filled bowl on a baking sheet before it went into the oven as I was paranoid about it shattering.  The one change I made was to leave pouring the extra brandy (or rum, in this case) over the hot cake as that would definitely have shattered the bowl.  I brushed that all over the cake once cold and fed it a similar amount of booze a couple of times before it was time to decorate.

For this cake I pre-prepared the Christmassy mouse and the holly leaves to ensure they’d be rock hard by the time I needed them.

You don’t need to buy special holly cutters, and if you do want to, I suggest buying them in the summer when there isn’t a massive rush for them!!  I had a couple from years ago, but had managed to lose the biggest cutters.  So instead I cut out ovals of modelling paste (50:50 blend of sugar paste and flower paste, strong, tastes decent and more pliable to work with) coloured a darkish green and scalloped the edges with the end of a piping tip until it looked right.  Draw in the veining with a knife and you’re done.  I dried the leaves over crumpled bits of foil to give them more shape.

The mouse was more difficult, but still relatively straightforward.  I used the same modelling paste recipe and coloured it cream.  The instructions I followed are from “The Essential Guide to Cake Decorating” but any mouse tutorial you find online would be fine.  My biggest tip here is that sugar glue is your friend.  Much better and stronger than water for sticking models together.  I am a complete convert!  After I modelled the mouse, I stuck in wire whiskers and allowed it to dry before painting.  I’ve got to say that I’m really proud of my little mouse!  I did intend to have him holding a Christmas card or carol singing sheet, but in the end I thought he was just perfect on his own.

In comparison to making the mouse and holly leaves, assembling the rest of the cake was really easy.  Apricot glaze, marzipan. Let dry. Rum, dark brown fondant. Let dry.  Glue on white splat-shaped sugar paste to make the sauce/cream on top of the pud and try your best to remove all the icing sugar that’s dripped everywhere.  Glue on blobs of black sugar paste to represent raisins.  Move to covered board and stick down with royal icing or sugar glue. Glue on holly leaves, holding each leaf in place until set.  (If necessary, stick a holly berry underneath to hold the leaf up.  The finishing touch is to roll some red sugar paste (or flower paste if you have some pre-dyed) into balls and stick them in place.  To really gild the lily, glaze the holly berries with a little piping gel.

And there you have it!  A Christmas Pudding Christmas Cake!!