Just taken my Christmas cake out of the simmering oven. I tell you what - it’s going to be a good year this year!
We used my mother’s as bricks for the foundation of a shed we built one year, killed a whole colony of termites that tried to get established there.
We made fun of them when we were children. I like them now with a nice custard topping if that’s possible. Some people grow up dwest.
sure do like the dreamers
Christmas cake with custard??!?! I think you guys must mean something different by Christmas cake. Over here in the UK, it’s a gert big, moist*, heavy cake laden with fruit and enough alcohol in it to kill a driving licence at a hundred paces.
*Yay! Got my word in. 
They’re not so moist here and the further south you go, the less of an ingredient alcohol is. I’d still like mine with custard though, even if it was moist.
I can see I’m going to have to post a piccie …
Trust me, Ben: we’re all talking about fundamentally the same thing, such as it ahem pans out. As for the custard, that’s a new one on me, too. But then I don’t live in Mutey’s balmy climes. If that has anything to do with it.
Most of the (nonhuman) fruitcakes (as we Merkins call them) you see in the States are commercial products, of varying yet at the same time consistently brick-like outcome, and liable to be disappointing to most. That’s why we make jokes about them. And in Minnesota (Land of 10,000 Treatment Centers), a rightly proper booze-laden fruitcake would be seen as near-contraband, or at least a moral stumble. You can hear our bluenoses clucking their tongues at the very idea. I mock them with a great mockery.
Personal recipe from I.D.10-t to follow.
ew! aren’t we preemptive today!
Well, he’s actually had some pretty good ones, IMO. Don’t remember if he does the booze thing, though…just speculating, but a nice pear brandy might be the shiznit.
Sherry and brandy in mine.
The classics are classic for good reason. 
Yeah. I use an old old recipe which was re-printed in the Western Mail over 30 years ago. I have the page from the paper and have been using that same recipe ever since.
… oh, except that I double the amount of alcohol it says to use.
I’m not sure what Mute means by custard, either, but it’s possible it’s what we New Englanders would call custard sauce. IIRC, it’s kind of a cooked eggnog – eggs, milk, sugar, brandy/burbon/rum (probably optional, especially in states with dry counties). I’ve encountered something similar called hard sauce, but I think the sugar in that was either caramelized or brown. In any case, it goes well with a fruitcake, and adds a nice amount of moisture and booze to a cake that’s too dry and doesn’t have enough booze in it.
No risk of that with mine. It’s moist now, and will be well fed between now and Christmas. Yum!
Yep, that’s what I meant by custard.
So glad your cake come out fine. A whole holiday’s success was based on that cake.
To elicit your pity, Ben, here is an example, commercial and very typical, of what we Statesiders associate with the word “fruitcake”:
Garish, isn’t it. And probably not all that tasty. And while we’re on the topic of questionable holiday, um, “treats”, allow me as a Minnesotan to give you all a glimpse into the dark world of lutefisk (I wouldn’t have bothered with this bit of OT but this new-found pic is just too real to resist):
I know. I don’t get it, either.
What is going on with that fork? Did someone hurl on the tines and then come back for more?
That “cake” looks dreadful. That’s never actually sold under the description “fruit cake” is it? You’d be had up under the Trades Descriptions Act here for that.
You could say that. Minnesotans are unique, and like flies, we partially pre-digest our food outside our stomachs. That’s what you’re seeing there: the digestion process.
No, but seriously, it’s a cream-based white sauce, which is traditional. I don’t see how it could improve anything. And no one dares call it Béchamel: they’d be laughed out of the Veterans’ Hall.