This years eggless christmas cake soon to be fed vast quantities of sherry…

I made my Christmas cake yesterday. Using the eggless Christmas cake recipe from last year, I doubled the quantity and put the mixture in a square pan to cook in my table top oven (my proper round cake tin wouldn’t fit) as my full size oven is still out of action..

With dried fruit being hard  to get hold of in large quantities on the home front during WW2 in Britain, the fruitcake has much less fruit than I’d normally use in a Christmas cake but this year I’m going to moisten it up with lots of sherry (readily available during the first rationed Christmas of 1940) and this year it will be decorated with a mock marzipan AND real icing sugar (it wasn’t until a couple of years later that icing sugar was banned).

I’ve started off the blackberry vodka.. almost identical to the way sloe gin is made.

I’ve also started on making “Blackberry Vodka” for Christmas presents (although I am unsure whether this would have been a recipe used in the 1940s, I am sure as people made “Sloe Gin” that it is quite possible…) Spirits were expensive and harder to get hold of later during the war but as my Christmas is going to be based on the first wartime Christmas on rations for the British, I’d say that the drinks cabinet may well have had some spirits/liquor still hanging around.

In addition I will be making gifts of  Apple “Air-Raid” Chutney and “Mock Marmalade” and I’ll share those recipes and photos with you as I do so..

I’ve plenty of sugar for the preserves, I’ve been squirreling that away 🙂

C xxxx