Christmas cake with dried fruits and nuts

10 servings
3 days 2 hours 20 min

How do I bake a Christmas pie? Nuts with dried fruits must be soaked in strong fragrant alcohol in advance. Cognac or whiskey is suitable. Of 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 suit your taste, or take the finished 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.

Transfer the dried fruits washed and chopped into a deep bowl, add the nuts and pour over the whiskey. If you do not drink alcohol, regular boiling water can be used. 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. Boiling water will be much faster due to the high temperature.

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

Transfer the soft butter to a bowl and pour over the sugar and vanilla sugar.

With a whisk, slightly stir sugar into the butter so that it does not scatter around the sides at high speeds of the mixer. Then whisk the mixture until fluffy for 4 minutes.

One at a time, introduce chicken eggs into the mixture, stirring everything with a mixer until homogeneous.

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

Sift the rest of the flour and baking powder into the dough. Top grade flour. You can add a pinch of salt to the dough for taste. Using a mixer, mix the mixture until smooth. The dough should be thick, about as in the photo.

Mix the dough with the nuts with a cooking spatula.

Put the dough in the tin. I have a silicone shape measuring 22 * 6 cm. The height of the side is 6 cm. The shape is taken precisely rectangular (or round with a hole in the middle) for better baking of the pie, since the dough is heavy. Bake the cake in the oven preheated to 160 ⁰S for 1-1. 5 hours. Check the readiness with a wooden toothpick.

Remove the cake from the oven and cool.

Let's cover the pie with icing. I recommend using fresh squeezed lemon juice. Introduce the lemon juice half a teaspoon into a bowl of icing sugar and assess the consistency of the glaze. Powders can leave more than indicated.

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

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

I chose the second option. Decorate the pie and give the glaze time to set, become matte.