Hot toddy fruitcake
This fabulous Christmas cake can be made and decorated in four very different ways. Just choose your
favourite
Snowman in the garden cake
- Preparation and cooking time
- Prep:
- 1 hr 30 mins
- A challenge
- Cuts into 12 slices
Skip to ingredients
To cover cake
- 20cm fruitcakesee Goes well with
- 23 or 25cm round, thick cake board
- 5 tbsp apricot jamwarmed and sieved
- 500g natural marzipan
- 100g white ready-to-roll icing
To decorate
- 100g white ready-to-roll icing
- 1 egg white
- 200g icing sugar
- green food colouring
- 6 gingerbreadtrees, see link below
- small black writing icingtube (Supercook, available from tesco)
- small orange sweet, such as a Tic-Tacor an orange hundred and thousand, for the nose
- 30cm thin coloured ribbon
- 1m x 1.5cm ribbonfor the base
Nutrition: per serving
- kcal0
- fat0g
- saturates0g
- carbs0g
- sugars0g
- fibre0g
- protein0g
- salt0glow
Method
step 1
Cover the cake with jam, marzipan and ready-to-roll icing), taking the icing to the edge of the board.
step 2
To decorate, roll out several marble-sized balls of the 100g ready-to-roll icing to make snowballs, then set aside. Roll two larger balls, one a little bigger than the other, to make the head and body of the snowman, then leave to dry for at least 30 mins.
step 3
Meanwhile, ice the gingerbread trees. Beat the egg white with the icing sugar to make a smooth paste. Put about one-third of the icing into another bowl, then mix in a speck of green colouring and a few drops water so that it’s fairly runny and very pale green. Spread this over three of the gingerbread trees and leave to dry. Spoon another third of the icing into a piping bag fitted with a fine writing nozzle. Pipe rough fir-tree-like branches over the remaining trees. Once the green iced trees have dried to the touch, pipe branches over those, too.
step 4
When the icing has set, fix the trees onto the cake and around the edge using spots of the remaining thick royal icing. Put the smaller snowballs around and on top of the cake. Pipe eyes and a mouth onto the head of the snowman and insert the nose. Fix the snowman’s head on with a spot more icing, position him on the cake, then carefully tie a ribbon scarf with the shorter length of ribbon. This is easiest if you start with too much ribbon, tie it, then trim with scissors. To finish, attach ribbon around the base and secure woth a double-sided tape.
