Christmas (Commonwealth Union)_ The original Christmas cake was a plum pudding, which was a porridge really, and because the lead-up to Christmas used to be a fasting period, the porridge would line their stomachs before the big day. Later on it developed into a cake, as richer families had ovens to bake in.
European cakes were starting to resemble something like our modern idea of cake, somewhere around the 14th to 15th century, with earlier ‘cakes’ being more like breads. Even in the late 17th century, these enriched breads were still popular, and were still eaten regularly for breakfast among the more wealthy. Cakes that were sweeter and looked and tasted more like the cakes we know now were emerging alongside the enriched breads with dried fruits included in many of these cakes.
What are Christmas plums?
Dried fruits were known generally as plums hence the plum cake/plum pudding, the early name given to fruitcakes. These arrived in Great Britain in the 13th century and were expensive luxury foods, as were sugar and spices. Given that the fruitcake as we know it today could make up half the weight of a finished cake, they could not have existed prior to this date.
In the medieval period, festive and symbolic cakes came into their own as sugar, spices and fruits became more plentiful. Communal feasts and customs settled into regular places in the calendar.
What was traditional Christmas pudding?
Puddings were probably a boiled porridge of grains, eggs and milk which was gradually sweetened and spiced until it became our boiled Plum (Christmas) pudding traditionally made on Stir up Sunday. These Christmas puddings at some stage also started to be baked and evolved into a traditionally heavy and dark fruitcake.
While the Christmas pudding was and still remains part of the Christmas celebrations, the baked cake, which still contained yeast in its early form, was not originally made for Christmas but for Twelfth Night. The cake played a significant role at this feast day from around the 16th century onwards.
Christmas cake
There has been feasting and festivities taking place in late December for much longer than Christianity has been with us, but these and other festive traditions were abolished during the middle of the 17th century when all the trappings of Christmas were banned by the Puritan government. The government remained in session on the 25th December 1642, and churches were ordered only to give their regular service and people were expected to work. This was unpopular (There’s a surprise!) and there were riots in some parts of the country. With the reinstatement of the monarchy eighteen years later King Charles II swept away all these restrictions on festivals and Christmas returned, though probably less raucous than in the previous decades.
The festivities and rituals around Christmas really developed again, during the Victorian era that many of them are the ones we recognise today such as Christmas trees and the sending of cards.
Feeding the cake
You can feed the Christmas cake once a week or so with a tablespoon or two of cherry brandy right up until a few days prior to icing the cake (presuming that you are going to ice the cake).
The icing on Christmas cake
Royal icing was the classic icing for the Christmas cake and it was called ‘royal’ icing because the British Royal Family used it for their wedding cakes. Icing had been around since the 18th century as prior to that there wasn’t the technology to refine the sugar sufficiently. The very first icing was similar to royal icing, was spread over the top of the cake and then the cake was returned to the oven to set the icing hard. The final result was a flat, shiny surface like that of a frozen lake, which gave it the name ‘icing’. The first written recording of the word icing was by Elizabeth Raffald who mentions it in The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769).
Today many people find fondant icing a quicker and easier icing to use to decorate the Christmas cakes.
