Last weekend we had quite a bit of snow - the first accumulated snow of this year in the area - and we enjoyed staying and spending time together at home, a kind of "snowed-in" feeling :-)
It was an unusually relaxing weekend for Amar, who usually goes to office both on Saturdays and Sundays and spend at least for several hours there, and so it was a perfect timing for him to make his "famous NZ Christmas cake"!
This fruit cake uses 1.25kg amount of dried fruits (assortment of raisins, currants, sultanas, and apricots) and some nuts to be baked in a 20cm square cake tin!! So it is a very rick, heavy cake. And thanks to the bitter-sweetness of brandy, orange rind and lemon rind, and sour-sweetness of dried fruits, the cake is not overly sweet but just full of rich and complex flavour.
I heard that in the United States "Christmas fruit cakes" have a very bad press, and because it is so unpopular that there is a joke which says "It is often given as a present, but no one likes it. The joke is that the person who receives it, saves it and gives it to someone else next Christmas." I found similar things said on a few websites on the internet, and in one of them a British person declares that it is totally understandable because "American fruitcake that you buy at the supermarket is pretty nasty stuff. It contains artificially-colored glazed fruit that is bright red and green. It is sort of sticky and sort of gummy and doesn't taste real."
But (according to this English person and from what I have observed so far) English and NZ traditional fruitcakes are definitely a "real thing" --- no artificial flavour, no artificially glazed fruits, and just a natural, rich flavour.
Thank you Amar, for making this delicious Christmas Cake!
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