This query was emailed to me from Anne but I need your help as I don't know the answer.

Yesterday I cooked a fruit cake (a first time recipe and a large amount - 1 kg of fruit and what I consider to be an over abundance of butter - 400 gms !!) I have decided to keep it for Christmas and my question is - what is the best way to store it especially with what I consider to be such a large amount of butter ?, I don't want it to go rancid and spoil the taste. Do you think that ALL that butter was necessary (it had 2 cups of four in the recipe) ?

A while ago I had a cup of coffee at our Christchurch Cup Cake shop. With that I had a piece of fruit cake which contained 'marzipan' - yummy !. Yesterday when I made my fruit cake I bought a slab of almond icing (because New World didn't have any marzipan) and I cut it up in chunks and added it to the flour before adding that to the rest of the mixture. I have a funny feeling that all the almond icing has melted but I am sure it will provide a really nice flavour. What is you opinion and maybe some help on this.

im not a clever one at all, but all that comes to mind is freezing it.....

I always make my Christmas cakes around this time of year and then freeze them
Never have had a problem

Bev M

Me too when it comes to freezing.

Sorry, can't help you there, I only ever make the Easy-as Christmas cake that has no butter, eggs or sugar in it, but plenty of alcohol to preserve and flavour it.

As for the marzipan, it's the same thing as almond icing. Ground almonds mixed with icing sugar and used as a buffer between a dark fruit cake and the (usually) white icing of a formal cake, such as a wedding or Christmas cake. It's used to stop the dark colours of the cake seeping through and discolouring the icing. It's also used to wrap around a Battenberg cake to hold it together after fitting the pieces together with a jam or cream filling. It would be interesting to see and taste the effects of having marzipan cooked through the cake.

I don't think I have used that much butter in my Kg of fruit cakes usually around 250grams from memory but have not yet checked through my recipes.
Freezing sounds reasonable to store it for a length of time.
I don't usually make cake that far in advance but thinking I must start soon as the hens (3) are all laying and I am getting a backlog of eggs.
Marzipan is used as a layer in simnel cake, usually made for Easter -don't know why- but I have not made one
On reflection I do store some cakes for a few months wrapped in layers of baking paper and the odd drizzle of brandy and they seem to keep as I don't cut all the cakes at Christmas.I have the wrapped cake in a supermarket bag, not a sealed bag, and in a cool room.
The butter does seem to leach out into the paper over time and I do change it sometimes. That is if I don't forget the cake is there and find it the next year when getting organised for the next bake up

Jean

One of the several fruit cakes I make is a super simple but very nice Christmas cake which uses 2 cups of flour and 5 eggs and 1kg dried fruit. This makes a high 20cm square cake and uses 250 g butter, so I do think your cake uses and excess of butter Anne. I wonder how many eggs are in your recipe as I believe the more eggs in a heavy fruit cake the better it keeps. I seldom freeze Christmas cakes but leave them in their lining paper, then wrap in greaseproof paper and finally wrap in tin foil and store in either a tin or plastic container in a cool place and sprinkle brandy over every so often. If you are in doubt maybe you should freeze the cake as others have suggested.

Regarding the almond icing I have remembered Alison Holst's comment in her Simnel cake recipe. She mentions the fact that you can use homemade almond pastes or make a mock almond paste from semolina, but bought almond flavoured icing as a cake filling shouldn't be used unless you are certain it is made from ground almonds. Using bought almond flavoured sugar icings will soften and spoil the cake. So if you used this type of icing it will probably make your cake quite moist (but delicious in flavour for sure!). I can give you an almond paste recipe made with ground almonds and also an almond filling recipe made with semolina which is also fine to be cooked into the cake.

Just by the way, for those who followed "Debbie does Edmonds" blog, I was the lucky person to eat (well I did share it with others) the Edmonds Simnel cake Debbie made. The flavour was to die for as I am an absolute almond flavour fan - so I was totally in heaven and I could still distinguish in places the layer of almond paste through the cake.
Regards,
Dawn.

Sorry Lorna Almond Icing is not the same as marzipan if you look at the ingredients of the commercial ones.It is just icing sugar and oil and flavouring.Although it probably cause any major problems to the cake it will probably just melt into it and add an almondy flavour.

I have frozen Christmas cakes and also done what Dawn suggested; keeping cake in the lining paper, wrapping in foil and sprinkling brandy over at regular intervals. I didn't think of the greaseproof paper, but that sounds a good idea.

It does seem like a lot of butter, I wonder if Anne could give us the recipe. I imagine the almond icing melted into the cake would give it a delicious almond flavour.

If it was my cake I'd be inclined to cut it in half, freeze one half and follow Dawn's suggestion for the other half.

OK Toots, I was thinking back years ago when the stuff you bought off the shelf was marzipan. I haven't bought any for years, so believed the modern stuff to be the same. I should have known the recipe would have changed over time to include just the flavour and not the 'goods', so to speak. I stand corrected.

Thats OK Lorna! There are two brands of marzipan at my Countdown but their almond content is only about 28% My recipe is 50% almond. I was brought up on the same in UK but made the mistake of buying the almond paste here,Yuck!