Gluten Free Christmas Cake

Page in Sainsbury's mag that ACTUALLY MENTIONS changes for a gluten free bake!

Having spotted the above recipe in the December 2012 Sainsbury's Magazine, we couldn't not give it a go.  As regular readers of this blog will know, we rarely stick to the letter of a recipe and this one was no different.  We'd bought a small, springform cake tin from Aldi the other week (18cm round) and wanted to make a cake in it.  So, we halved the ingredients listed in the Mag and used the following:-

75g ready to eat figs - chopped
112g stoned, soft prunes - chopped
50g skin on almonds
112g soft butter
92g dark brown soft sugar (we only used 62g due to a calculation error!)
125g self raising flour (we used Dove's Farm, gluten free)
¼tsp ground cinnamon
¼tsp ground ginger
pinch of ground cloves
2 large eggs, lightly beaten (we used 3 medium eggs)
112g raisins (we used mixed dried fruit)
1½Tablespoons black treacle
Juice and zest of ¾ lemon

The figs and prunes were chopped using scissors.

Having creamed the butter and sugar (using an electric hand mixer as we don't *yet* have a stand mixer)...  the flour and ground spices were added to the mix a third at a time, with a little of the beaten egg and mixed thoroughly before adding more.

Once all the flour and eggs were incorporated, the remaining ingredients were then mixed through by hand. 

The cake, ready to bake in our fab 18cm Aldi springform tin

Testing the cake - the knife's clean!

Having heated the oven to 150ºC, we baked the cake for 50 minutes then checked on it.  At this point, it was looking quite browned on top, so we covered it with foil to reduce the chance of burning and returned it to the oven for another 15 minutes.  We then checked it with a knife to see if it was cooked through.




Once the knife, inserted into the cake, came out clean, the cake was removed from the oven and left to cool completely in the tin.

Cooled Christmas cake - what a level top it has.

Here's the cake... ready to be decorated... another day!