Christmas Cakes

Our answer

We can confirm that the amount of bourbon in Nigella's Traditional Christmas Cake in Christmas is correct at 400ml/1 2/3 cups. As the fruit is heated with the alcohol the day before it tends to absorb a fair amout of the liquid overnight, leaving the fruit deliciously plump. Any bourbon not absorbed by the fruit should be added into the cake batter when you add the fruit.

Unfortunately we are unable to provide scaled recipes for most cakes, though in her book Christmas Nigella does give a Christmas cake recipe for 3 different tin sizes. There good news is that fruit cakes are realtively easy to scale down and there are several cake scaling charts available on-line. Some cake decorating books also have fruit cake recipes which cover many different sized tins which you could also use as a guideline. If you need to use half an egg for your chosen recipe then we suggest that you use just the egg yolk, and save the white for another use.

For Nigella's Incredibly Easy Chocolate Fruit Cake the prunes are dried and not tinned/canned. They are also bought already pitted. For preference we would use the softer, ready-to-eat type