Cake. Is there a word in the English language that cheers a room up faster? Say it at the office and watch the heads pop up like meerkats. Say it at Christmas and the whole family is suddenly very keen to help in the kitchen (funny, that).
Now, before anyone writes in, let's settle the big one. What actually makes a cake a cake? In 1991, a British tax tribunal had to decide exactly that, because cakes carried no VAT and chocolate-covered biscuits did. McVitie's turned up with a giant Jaffa Cake to prove a point, and one of the things that swung it was this: cakes go hard when they go stale, and biscuits go soft. The Jaffa Cake goes hard. Cake. Case closed.
So here's your rule of thumb. If it goes hard when you forget about it, it's a cake, and you're in the right place. If it goes soft, it's a biscuit, and you want my cookie collection instead.
In this collection, you'll find 15 cakes made for Christmas, from the fruit cakes your nan swore by (a classic one, a gluten-free one and a vegan one, so everyone at the table gets a slice) to the ones that sneak a little gin past the children.
Each recipe lists precise weights, bake times and oven temperatures, from a gentle 140°C for the fruit cakes up to 180°C for the sponges (that's 275°F to 350°F for my friends in the US), because when it comes to cake, precision matters even more than it does with cookies. A cookie forgives you. A cake remembers.
The fifteen recipes
Each recipe sits in its own section, with the ingredients on the left and Mike's method on the right. Tick the ingredients off as you weigh them out. Choose a recipe from the list above, or from the menu at the top of the page.
