Christmas Cake

Chocolate Fruit Cake

This is the perfect cut-and-come again cake for any time of the year. It lasts for a fortnight, but has the squidgy fabulousness of something so much less serviceable-sounding. I know there are a lot…

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Easy-Action Christmas Cake

I just throw everything into a pan, let the heat from the stove send buttery rum and citrus juices permeating into the currants, sultanas and raisins, add flour and eggs, a can of chestnut purée to gi…

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Pomegranate Jewel Cake

Many cultures use food that resembles money — lentils for coins, saffron for gold — in celebratory meals, to invoke a wish for prosperity and good fortune ahead, and this fragrant, light, flourless al…

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Christmas Cupcakes

These beauties also make a very good alternative to mince pies. I buy the icing ready made and dyed (which is why it isn’t a very convincing colour for holly, let’s be frank) and use cranberries as th…

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Clementine Cake

This, an adaption of Claudia Roden's magnificent orange and almond cake, is a wonderfully damp, dense and aromatic flourless cake: it tastes like one of those sponges you drench, while cooling, with s…

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Christmas-Spiced Chocolate Cake

I love a fallen chocolate cake, and have found most everyone else does too. The cakes are so called because they are compact and flourless and, when cooling out of the oven, their rich centres drop an…

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Gorgeously Golden Fruit Cake

This is the fruity blonde sister to that brunette temptress, my chocolate fruit cake from Nigella Christmas. It delivers, as promised, a cake of apricot-pear-and-ginger goldenness and goodness, so squ…

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Spruced-Up Vanilla Cake

This is a sleight of hand, or a trick of equipment rather than an act of brilliance. True, the cake does look incredibly complicated and seasonally impressive as it comes to the table, but that is all…

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Yule Log

I know the recipe looks finicky, and I can’t promise it’s a doddle, but it works easily and you will soon find you are rolling chocolate logs without a care. In fact, if you have a lot of people comin…

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Smooth Hatbox Icing

I love a plain white-iced cake: smooth icing, wrapping the cake almost like a hatbox. I am happy to have this decorated, but I'd just as soon the decorations were also white. Here, I've cut out a wibb…

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Pumpkin Bundt Cake

It’s no secret that I love a bundt cake: it just looks instantly celebratory. Plus, once you have the tin (and if you don't, you can bake this cake in a 20cm/8 inch square tin) you do want to get good…

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Cider and 5-Spice Bundt Cake

Most of the time I refer to this as my Cider and 5-Spice Gingerbread, but I changed the name out of concern for those who expect a little more gingeriness from their gingerbead (although anyone is fre…

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Date and Marmalade Christmas Cake

This cake tastes like Christmas pudding — a very, very good Christmas pudding — the sort the Quakers (as I’m fond of quoting) once magnificently condemned as “the invention of the scarlet whore of Bab…

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Italian Christmas Pudding Cake

This recipe is my own but at the same time a conflation of a couple of Italian Christmas must-haves: the glorious, fruit-studded panettone and crema di mascarpone, which is best described as tiramisu…

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Chocolate Gingerbread

I’d never come across a chocolate gingerbread, and after making this one for the first time, I wondered why not. There’s something about the glottally thickening wodge of chocolate chip and cocoa that…

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Luscious Vegan Gingerbread

I am preposterously proud of this squidgy gingerbread, and I don't mind who knows it. It's everything you want out of a gingerbread — sticky, spicy, deeply aromatic — and you would never miss the butt…

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Chestnut Cheesecake

There is no doubt about it, anything with chestnuts in it, even if they come vacuum-packed or canned and are perennially available, is so right for this time of year. The chestnuts are present, in the…

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Chocolate Chestnut Refrigerator Cake

This is another of my maternal grandmother's recipes. I've changed it a bit, not least substituting dark rum for her juice and zest of an orange and a slug or two of Grand Marnier. It's not that I did…

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Chocolate Cloud Cake

On days when I want the warmth of the hearth rather than the hurly burly of the city streets I stay in and read cookery books, and this recipe comes from just the sort of book that gives most succour,…

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Devil's Food Cake

Forget the name, this cake is heavenly. The crumb is tender, the filling and frosting luscious. When I made it one Friday, I expected my children, resident food critics much in the mould of the Grim e…

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Gleaming Maple Cheesecake

This is an exquisite cheesecake, tangy and delicate, with the pronounced smokiness and subdued sweetness of the maple syrup. It has a fabulously light, smooth and voluptuous texture, and two things he…

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Holiday Hot Cake With Eggnog Cream

A warming, welcoming pud full of seasonal spice that can be thrown together in a matter of minutes. Truly a pudding to give thanks for. As for the eggnog cream, by all means add a grating of nutmeg if…

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Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake

This is, for me, the quintessential chocolate cake: melting, luscious and mood-enhancingly good. A food technologist would explain this in terms of "mouthfeel" but I don't know quite how that makes me…

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I've made this cake many times and never a crumb has been left ! Everyone I made it for has said how lovely it is and is become my go to cake for all occasions ! Thank you Nigella for all your lovely recipes x

Vanilla Layer Cake with Ermine Icing

This is the sort of cake you’d find in an old-fashioned diner of your dreams: a majestic creation, frosted with fluffy, super-sweet buttercream, just made to stand aloft and enticingly on the counter.…

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