Christmas cake with dried fruits and nuts

Step-by-step cooking

1. Step 1:

   

   How to bake a Christmas cake? Nuts with dried fruits should be soaked in strong aromatic alcohol in advance. Cognac or whiskey will do. Dried fruits I have dried apricots, figs, raisins and candied fruits. And from nuts - hazelnuts, cashews, peanuts and almonds. You can choose dried fruits and nuts to your taste or take a ready-made mixture. If you like spicy pastries, you can add cinnamon, ground ginger, cardamom and a little ground cloves to the mixture. Just a teaspoon of spices.

2. Step 2:

   

   In a deep bowl, put the dried fruits washed and cut into medium pieces, add nuts and pour whiskey. If you do not drink alcohol, you can use ordinary boiling water. But then the taste of the pie will be completely different. We need the mixture to absorb all the liquid. It took me 3 full days. It will be much faster with boiling water because of the high temperature.

3. Step 3:

   

   Prepare all the ingredients for the cake. Dried fruits should swell and absorb whiskey by this time, and nuts should become soft. We take butter and eggs at room temperature.

4. Step 4:

   

   Put the soft butter in a bowl and pour the sugar and vanilla sugar.

5. Step 5:

   

   With a whisk, lightly stir the sugar into the butter so that it does not fly apart at high speeds of the mixer. Then whisk the mixture until fluffy for 4 minutes.

6. Step 6:

   

   Add chicken eggs to the mixture one by one, mixing everything with a mixer until smooth.

7. Step 7:

   

   Mix 2 tbsp flour with dried fruits. It is believed that this way the nuts will not settle to the bottom when baking.

8. Step 8:

   

   Sift the remaining flour and baking powder into the dough. Flour of the highest grade. You can add a pinch of salt to the dough for taste. Use a mixer to mix the mixture until smooth. The dough should turn out to be thick, like in the photo.

10. Step 9:

    

    Mix the dough with nuts with a cooking spatula.

11. Step 10:

    

    Put the dough into the mold. I have a silicone mold measuring 22*6 cm. The height of the side is 6 cm. The shape is taken exactly rectangular (or round with a hole in the middle) for better baking of the pie, since the dough is heavy. Bake the pie in a preheated oven to 160 ° C for 1-1.5 hours. Check the readiness with a wooden toothpick.

12. Step 11:

    

    Remove the pie from the oven and cool.

13. Step 12:

    

    Cover the cake with icing. I recommend using freshly squeezed lemon juice. Add lemon juice by half a teaspoon in a bowl with powdered sugar and evaluate the consistency of the glaze. Powder may leave more than indicated.

14. Step 13:

    

    There are two options for the thickness of the glaze. This thick one will need to be applied and leveled with a spoon or a spatula. It does not flow and turns out to be opaque.

15. Step 14:

    

    And a more liquid glaze is simply poured over the cake. It will be translucent.

16. Step 15:

    

    I chose the second option. Decorate the cake and give the glaze time to harden, become matte.