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Thursday 6 December 2012

Making a Christmas cake

For the last week or so I have been searching for Christmas cake ingredients and buying things when I see them. You may think this is an odd thing for me to blog about as most of you can all just pop down to countdown or new world and pick up a packet of dried fruit mix, glaced cherries and any other assortment of baking ingredients that take your fancy! Not so In France. I have discovered that French housewives don't really bake - why would they when you can buy the most amazing pastries and cakes from the bakery. Also, the French Christmas cake is a chocolate log ( Jasper is thrilled about this) so trying to buy ingredients for a NZ Christmas cake was always going to be a challenge!

Just to make it all the more challenging I also need to make the cake gluten free! The first step was to actually buy a cake tin then I set about going to various different shops to buy the ingredients I wanted. Several days and quite a lot of money later I had all I needed. As the kids only have half a day of school on Wednesdays and it was such a grotty day yesterday we decided to spend the afternoon making the cake. Years ago I made my Christmas cake with the kids and vowed I would never do that again but I decided that as they were older it would surely be easier! I am pleased to announce that apart from the fighting over the wooden spoon to lick it was all very stress free!







Using different ingredients and different gluten free flour plus a different oven could have been a recipe for disaster but it looks pretty good. James and I have had a sneaky taste and it is not too dry. So will leave it nicely wrapped up and hopefully it gets nice and moist ready for Christmas.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

5 comments:

  1. Yummmmmmm!!!

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  2. It looks fabulous Rach, strange they don't have a fruit cake, but then I guess a chocolate log is really more Christmassy with a bit of icing sugar sprinkled over the icing and a sprig of holly?

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  3. Awesome Rachel - good for you!

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  4. Well done. It looks lovely. You have done well getting your pattern with the cherries and almonds so even. Are you going to have the chocolate log as well? I guess you will just buy that.

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  5. Hi Rachel, James and kids - Good to know that Christmas, Winter, shopping rush etc are all alive and well in France! Good on you with your cake baking. I have the ingredients sitting here - perhaps tomorrow will be the baking day. We are heading fast to the holidays - everyone is busy at school making Christmasy things and rehearsing for 5 Gold Rings - our 2012 performance. Our submissions against the school closure are in to The Ministry and now it is up to the Minister to make her decision - we hear finally in mid February. Did you know that Kate is heading to Queensland next year? She is excited about the start of her OE. Maybe she will get as far as you! Keep up the blog writing - they are great to read. Love to all, Jos M. x

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