I will never be a disappointment to Paul Hollywood in the showstopper round of GBBO - because I have no wish whatsoever to go on there.
Every single season, I look at the contestants’ creations in awe, and think how there’s no way on this earth I could do anything like that. For a start I was rubbish at art, at senior school. I can’t even draw a good stick-man. Hell, I can make a decent cake play around with the recipes but the creative stuff is beyond my ability - and patience. I bake for pleasure at a time that suits me...not in a sweltering hot marquee when given half the time actually necessary to make a Sussex Pond Pudding. In fact most of the time, I watch them pick up the instructions to the technical bake and think I’d last about 20 minutes before I chucked my apron across the room in a tantrum and walked out sobbing.
So, when it came to decorating our Christmas cake recently, it was never going to amaze - or disappoint - Paul Hollywood. We had our kitchen gutted and refitted in the summer; I binned my ages-old and little used collection of food colourings as part of the pre-build preparations and I never really restocked. I bought a tube of red food colouring recently but that was it.
The recipe for the cake itself is Chocolate Christmas Cake with Marzipan Topping from an ancient copy
of Woman & Home magazine that my fruit cake-hating late sister had made and enthused about. Like my mam and brother, I love fruit cake - but hubby can take it or leave it and our son would probably rather leave it, so this seemed like a good compromise. And ours - baked on Advent Sunday - has been ‘fed’ with Tia Maria every weekend since, so it should be good and moist with a nice kick to it (there’s nothing on this earth that Tia Maria can’t improve). The original pic with the recipe in the magazine is of a cake artfully decorated with sculpted and artfully burnished marzipan - but I’ve got a thing about fondant icing so our cake was going to have both.
Got the marzipan topping on successfully ☑️
Got a lovely smooth, seamless layer of fondant icing on ☑️
But what the heck to decorate it with? I remembered an episode of Delia Smith’s Christmas where she overlays her fondant icing with just loads of fondant icing holly leaves and it looked quite effective, so decide to channel my inner Delia. I used a set of Christmas cookie cutters and cut loads of Christmas trees and stars for the top, then alternate snowmen and gingerbread men for around the edge. And it looks pretty bloody good to me :)
Recipe for the cake: https://www.womanandhome.com/recipes/chocolate-christmas-cake/
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