Stir up Sunday

OK, so I know you're meant to make the Christmas pudding on Stir up Sunday, but I'm not making Christmas pudding this year, so I made the Christmas cake instead.

I went for the cop out option, a box of ingredients from Waitrose. This really is incredibly funny - you don't even have to measure things, it's all just packaged up separately ready to go in the mixing bowl. Like they used to do it on Blue Peter.

 Although they don't prepare the cake tin for you, had to do that myself!

Otherwise you just empty the lot into a bowl in a particular order and mix it all together. It didn't really feel like proper cooking! A few additional ingredients have to be added - orange & lemon zest, butter and 5 eggs.

 Put it in the cake tin:

 Shove it in the oven for 4 hours and lick the bowl out whilst you're waiting. This was also enough time to cook a roast dinner in t'other oven, watch Casualty and read the paper.

 And ta-da, one Christmas cake ready for marzipanning and icing at a later date.

The bonus of using the box kit was, I think, that it was a bit more economical than buying the ingredients separately. I'd have had things like the flour, sugar and spices in anyway, as I use those fairly regularly, but I'd have had to buy the black treacle, almonds and some of the dried fruit specially, and most of the rest of packets of that would have been wasted. Although it seemed a bit wasteful on the packaging front?

The extra ingredients were OK, as I use butter and eggs in cooking anyway, so had those in. I did have to buy an orange and lemon for the recipe, but I ate the orange, and sliced up the lemon to put in the freezer ready for future gin-and-tonics so it didn't go to waste.

Forgot to add - it's the Delia Christmas cake recipe.