We’re back in the swing of things, busy baking after a hectic December baking and packing our festive fruit cakes for mailing throughout the UK and Europe. We certainly kept Des, our dilligent local courier busy every day up to Christmas week! Of our four winter fruit cakes, the most popular was the traditional English Christmas  Cake with The Mulled Wine Fruit coming a close second. It seems more people are now wanting an alternative to the traditional iced Christmas Cake and our Mulled Wine certainly fits the bill. It’s made with copious quntities of Dark harvest red wine produced by our good friends Sam Linter and her team at Bolney Wine Estate, only a few miles from us, in the heart of the West Sussex countryside.

We take Sam’s wine and mull our own wine to a secret recipe with various spices and citrus zests, this simmers all afternoon, filling the kitchen with the heady aroma of warm spices and rich red wine. I’m sure we’re all drunk just from the smell by the time we go home! This warm mixture is then poured over the vine fruits,apricots and cherries and stirred through. The resulting wine fruit mixture sits for 24 hours allowing the fruit to swell soaking up the spiced wine. The smell the following day on opening the vat is amazing and it is hard to resist taking a spoon for a taste. The cake is ready to be made. We start with the finest English Butter, handmade for us by Rob Bookham in East Sussex. Most butters are made on a continuous churning and extrusion process but Rob Bookham believes in traditional methods. His Southdowns butter is made from matured cream, then churned, ice washed and finally extruded into the butter blocks before being packed by hand. A real labour of love, but wow can you taste the difference.  After mixing with other select ingredients, dark muscovado sugar from Mauritius, free range eggs from my Uncle’s farm in the Surrey hills, we bake each cake in our stone based ovens at a very slow mellow pace. After all the hard work and patience the cakes slowly bake for two and a half hours. The finished cakes are then ready for you to enjoy.