Bullfrog inspiration aside, a great deal of the fun of Christmas cakes is icing it yourself. It isn't actually all that hard and there are some good tutorials on the internet (or just ask your mum or gran!).
Christmas cake with the top sliced off and levelled, ready to be slathered with Ouse Valley's delicious Gooseberry & Elderflower Jam
I heartily recommend Cook UK's photo tutorial on how to ice a Christmas cake. It's in two steps, firstly:
How to marzipan the cake
then
How to ice the cake with rolled icing
They also show you how to do it 'the traditional way', i.e. with an icing sugar/water combo, but I can't say I've ever seen a Christmas cake done using that type of icing myself.
</a>Measuring the cake for the two side pieces
I
used about 3 Tb of jam, one packet of marzipan (225gm) and one packet
of ready roll Royal Icing (450gm) on the cake. The above tutorial uses
about twice that amount and you can go thicker, but huge fan of
marzipan though I am, I find any thicker to be too sweet for me. With
those amounts you get a layer of marzipan aprox 2mm thick and a layer
of icing about 2-3mm thick. A layer of 4-5mm of pure sugar is enough
for anyone I think!
</a>The marzipan layer covering the cake
With
memories of last time's wobbly wording, I bought an icing stencil to
make the letters this year. I think they turned out pretty well, though
I must admit it took me as long to cut the words out and place them as
it did to actually ice the cake! About an hour and a quarter I guess.
Getting the letters so they were firm and crisp took a little trial and
error. It turned out the best way to do so was roll to the icing out
thinly (about 1.5 - 2mm), let it stand for a little while so the
'dough' had started to harden a little, and then cut the letters out of
it.
The only other decoration (I like my cakes simple) consisted of a plastic sprig of holly. I also bought some rather gorgeous white pearlescent powder and covered the white of the cake with it. Unfortunately it photographed horribly and came out looking grey, so the last photo shows the cake before being powdered. You just have to imagine it with a beautiful irridescent sheen to it. And yes, it tasted as good as it looked!
Christmas Cake 2008
