Sri Lankan Christmas Cake

This year, I tried my hand at making Sri Lankan Christmas cake. My mother, the family keeper of all Christmas cake recipes of the past and present, was the obvious person to refer to for this exercise. After years of waiting, the time had come. I was presented with the recipe for rice flour Christmas cake this year. As I noted in my previous post, it was like getting knighted or something.

I tweaked the recipe in some ways. The first tweak came with the fruit and nuts. I let them sit in liqueur for nearly four weeks. Mom would usually let them sit for no more than five days. I added more liqueur as needed, starting with the traditional rum and brandy. As the weeks passed, the fruit would look thirsty from time to time so I moved on to things like calvados and homemade Italian cherry liqueur to keep them soused.

On the first night of December, the night of the Parisien leek soup, I decided it was time to make the cake. The cake, after all, has to age for at least three weeks before you can think of eating it. We industriously whipped butter with sugar, zested oranges and lemons, and mixed the drunken fruit into all of that.

We painstakingly lined cake tins with wax paper, trimming the edges and slitting the corners to ensure the most perfectly lined cake tin. They were popped into an oven with a bowl of water to keep things steamy and hydrated. We retired to the living room to watch a movie and shamelessly eat large amounts of almond roca and peanut brittle.

When the cake was nearly done, it was time to make the glaze for the top of the cake. Too late for regrets that I didn't artistically decorate the tops of my cakes with carefully cut maraschino cherries or slivered almonds like my mother would. I whipped out a jar of peach marmalade I made this summer, dumped its contents into a pot, added a wee bit of water and cornstarch and fired the stove up. Mum would have used apricot or raspberry jam. I was going to use boozed up peach marmalade. It bubbled and became translucent. I added in rum. Lots of it. The glaze was ready.

I used my pastry brush to glaze the cakes as soon as they came out of the oven. I loved the sweet sheen of the molten marmalade and the warm, heady smell of newly baked Christmas cake.

I left the little cakes out to cool overnight. The next morning, I wrapped the cakes as the oatmeal bubbled on the stove. Leaving their wax paper wraps intact, just as my mother has done a hundred times, I sheathed them in saran wrap, and then again in aluminium foil. I put them away on the shelves next to the rhubarb schnapps for a beauty sleep over the next three weeks.

Three weeks later, the cakes were ready. We sampled a bit a few days before Christmas and agreed the cake was worthy of sharing. On Christmas day, the cake had a place on the family plate of Sri Lankan Christmas sweets.

Happy holidays, dear readers. I wish you all a holiday filled with joy and a new year filled with love and good food. :)