Line the cake tin as described. Sieve flour, salt and spice into a bowl. In another bowl, cream butter and sugar until pale and creamy then beat in the eggs, a little at a time. Add the treacle. Mary Berry's Baking Bible: Revised and Updated: Fully updated with over 250 new and classic recipes Stir in the flour mixture, dried fruit, peel, cherries and almonds. Turn the mixture into the prepared baking tin.

Mary Berry's Christmas Collection: Over 100 Fabulous Recipes and Tips for a Trouble-free Festive Season The Great British Bake Off - Perfect Cakes & Bakes To Make At Home: Official tie-in to the 2016 series The Great British Bake Off - Perfect Cakes & Bakes to Make at Home: Over 100 Recipes from Simple to Showstopping Bakes and Cakes Fortunately a Christmas cake can and should be cooked in advance and put away to mature for a few weeks – so it will always be there to eat on Christmas Day and all the following week even if there is a power cut. Less well-prepared cooks can take heart.for 3 hours then reduce the oven temperature to gas mark ½ (130ºC) for a further hour or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. I own 96 cookbooks. Most of them are on a teak bookcase in my kitchen, but there are some in the shed, the bedroom, the living room, the utility room and the roof space. I also have four box files stuffed with recipes ripped from newspapers and magazines, and several butter-smeared notebooks of hand-written notes and menus. For my whole childhood my mother cooked from one book: the Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book. Mary Berry Cooks Up A Feast / Entertaining with Mary Berry: My Favourite Recipes for Occasions and Celebrations Mary Berry's Christmas Collection: Over 100 of My Fabulous Recipes and Tips for a Hassle-Free Festive Season

The food is unnaturally lurid and laid on scarlet tablecloths. The distinction between savoury and sweet has collapsed. Glacé cherries, peaches and bananas are paired with pork products. Most disturbing of all is the turkey in aspic, a hunk of cold poultry and mandarin orange segments suspended in a piss-coloured jelly set as firm as perspex. Everything is round or swirly; pineapple rings, fish mousse shaped like a life buoy, concentric circles of tiny cream rosettes. The effect is trippy, mesmerising. My favourite Christmas cake comes from the estimable Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book published in 1971.

Those could be testing times when trees brought down electricity lines with startling regularity, leaving us without power for days on end. When almost cold, remove greaseproof paper and turn the cake upside down. Pierce in several places with a skewer and spoon the brandy over. Mary Berry's Traditional Puddings and Desserts: Gorgeous classic recipes to treat family and friends Mary Berry's Christmas Collection: Over 100 Fabulous Recipes and Tips for a Hassle-Free Festive Season When my Dad, a professor, departed for academic conferences, we all simultaneously groaned at the thought of the limp vegetables and still-crunchy pasta my mother might prepare after returning home from her job teaching immigration law and human rights. Though it seemed normal, the way one’s childhood inevitably does, I began to notice different gender roles at play at friend’s houses, like when I noticed my fourth grade’s best friend’s mother, not father, removing chocolate-orange scones from a baking sheet the morning after a sleepover.