Well, it's December so I start thinking about Christmas. This recipe needed mincemeat, so I bought a jar and made this and a batch of mince pies. Both were delicious. The recipe wanted the apples to be baked with sherry. Didn't have any, so I used dark rum instead.
Had some home-made bread left over, and a jar of my dad's marmalade in the fridge. So hot marmalade pudding happened. Unfortunately, I used a too-big bowl to steam it in, so it was lopsided when I turned it out, but it still tasted wonderful. I'll be making this again, with my own marmalade (if that turns out!).
One word: yum. This would probably be a good Christmas dinner for two.
Served with a hot chocolate sauce. Required the purchase of a bottle of green ginger wine. After poaching and eating the pears, I wondered what to do with the leftover liquid. Put it back in the pan and simmered it down until very syrupy, then bottled it. Makes a good hot drink, diluted with some hot water.
I'm always a bit worried when I attempt loaf cakes and fruit cakes. There's always that slight worry over whether or not they're fully cooked. Every year, when I make my Christmas cake, there's that worry - worse, because I try to do a different recipe each year - over whether I got the timing right, whether that tester really was clean when it came out of the cake, did I just miss the massive uncooked section in the middle? The fear that, on Christmas day, when Dad and I both cut into our cakes (to swap bits of it), mine will collapse into a gooey mass of uncooked batter.
Still, that hasn't happened to me yet, and this isn't a Christmas cake. It has most of the same ingredients as one - dried fruit, chopped peel, glace cherries, a bit of spice, and some alcohol. It almost tastes like one. I suppose, cooked in a round tin instead of two loaf tins, fed with more whisky, then marzipanned and iced, it could be one. I'm not sure how well it would keep - but it tastes so good, I'm not sure how long it would need to keep.
