So what do you do when it’s 20°C in England in March (which absolutely never happens ever)?
a) Immediately get BBQ supplies and spend the day watching someone else cook.
b) Call up your friends and head to the park or the lake to sunbathe.
c) Make a Christmas cake.
If you answered c), you either know me too well or you’re a potential friend for life and we should really hang out more.
Joe got a Christmas cake kit at Christmas, and for some reason the use by date was February 2012. I figured it would probably still be ok to make and it seemed like a waste not to do it, so that ended up being our plan. I normally only bake from scratch, and I’ve honestly never even considered a Christmas cake before, probably because I’m always away from home at that time of year.
So we made a Christmas cake, and whilst the icing looks decidedly amateur and they were extremely stingy with the marzipan mix, it actually turned out pretty well:
It was an INSANE amount of work. When I opened the huge bag it came in and pulled out about twenty million white packets of varying sizes, I nearly gave up. When I started reading the instruction booklet, I just about died. Even with mostly everything prepped and ‘just’ the ingredients to mix together and icing to make and a ton of fresh ingredients to add, it still took three days. Serious time investment for the girl who doesn’t have time to find two matching socks or a hairbrush (MIA for a whole week now. I have a comb, but it’s pretty crap. You can tell).
It tastes good – and I should know, I’ve probably eaten half my body weight in it so far – but it will be the first and the last. Life is way too short to spend time making Christmas cake, especially in March.
Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering…yes I really am taking pictures of cake instead of cats or all the beautiful sunshine-glorified things outside. My plans to take photos of everything in the world at the weekend came to an abrupt halt when Joe got really sick and we had some bad news on top of that. 2012 is not going well, but that’s another blog entry.
3 Comments
Wow, I can’t imagine spending three days to make the cake! Or did you mean three hours? Either way, that’s a long time. I wish I had that hot weather. I’m originally from Nova Scotia and they also had that heat wave. They had some days that got up to 30C! But I moved to Alberta, so I didn’t get to enjoy that lovely weather. I was so jealous because on that same 30C day, it was -2C and we got 5cm of snow.
31/03/2012 at 3:05 pmIt was 3 days because we had to wait for things to cool and set and…yeah. It would be horrible to actually make one from scratch because it would take so much more time!
02/04/2012 at 2:20 pmWOW! I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much time making SOMETHING! The longest would probably be 2 days! It looks SO good though! :)
As for the bad news and Joe being sick and all… I hope things will get better for you guys…. I know how it feels when the year isn’t starting off right. *hugs*
05/04/2012 at 6:38 pm