Christmas is so nearly here (can you sense my excitement?!) that I thought I’d better get on with telling you how to ice that delicious Christmas cake from a few weeks back.
If you’ve been keeping up with the brandy soaking, your cake should be beautifully moist by now and ready for icing. It might seem a little old-fashioned, but I really like using royal icing on Christmas cake. Somehow, plain flat white icing just isn’t exiting enough.
You can buy royal icing sugar readily from any supermarket, and while it is a bit of a cheat – it’s easier and more practical than making it yourself I think. The home made version includes egg whites, so you won’t be able to keep your cake for as long – and in my experience Christmas cake tends to linger for a few weeks after the event as there’s always so much else to eat!
The other thing to say now is that I HATE marzipan, so I put in the extra effort to ice my cake without it. It’s a little more fiddly but if you can’t stand the stuff either, it is do-able.
To ice your cake you’ll need:
2 tablespoons apricot jam
1 pack of marzipan (optional)
1 500g pack of royal icing sugar
1 teaspoon glycerin
a drop of blue food colouring
First of all, make sure your cake is firmly placed on a cake board. You can cover the board with foil if it’s looking a little worse for ware. Then you need to heat up the jam and when it’s warm and very runny, spread it over the surface of the cake with a pastry brush. If you want to be really careful you can put a little blob on the covered board to stick the cake to it.
Once the jam is well spread over the surface, you’ll need to roll out your marzipan if you’re going to use it. Make sure you’ve got a bit extra when you roll it out so that you can place it over the cake and remove the extra. Smooth it on from the centre of the cake outwards and down the sides.
If you’re not opting for marzipan you can jump straight to the icing. Simply add water to the icing sugar, and beat well. Add the water gradually as you beat because you never need as much as you think. Once it’s beaten well add your glycerin and mix in. This stops the icing from going rock solid once it sets – you don’t have to add it, but if you don’t, be warned that it does go extremely hard.
Then add your drop of blue food colouring. This sounds bizarre, but just the tiniest bit of blue actually just makes the icing look a perfect bright white, rather than a little dull – it’s a nice touch my Mum taught me.
If you’ve used marzipan, putting the icing on will be a piece of cake (pardon the pun). If not, you’ll need to take a bit of care. In both cases it’s best to use a palette knife or something similar to spread the icing on and give it a nice textured finish.
If you don’t have marzipan just be careful that when you spread the icing you don’t pick up bits of the cake on the knife, it’s best to keep a bit of kitchen paper close by so you can keep wiping it. If you rush it you’ll end up with loads of brown speckles in your icing – not a good look.
Once it’s all spread on, give it some texture by making little peaks in the icing so it looks like snowy ground. Then, finish off by adding a sprig of holly and a dusting of icing sugar over the top.
{Image: Melissa Gray}
