Rescuing an Undercooked Christmas Cake

Regular readers on my blog may get the impression that my kitchen is the site of one miraculous food creation after another with never so much as a bit of burnt toast or a dropped jar. This would be because when things do go wrong, I tend not to blog about them... unless, of course, I think that other people may benefit from learning from my mistakes. I remember the first time I tried making fudge, which then stubbornly refused to set. It was at this point that I discovered that there were whole websites dedicated to "fudge disasters" and what could and couldn't be fixed and how to use up runny fudge. As "What can I do with my undercooked Christmas cake?" seems to be a fairly commonly asked question on the internet, I thought I would share my recent Christmas cake disaster... and remedy.

I baked the cake 6 weeks before Christmas, using a recipe I had not used before, and then dutifully "fed" it. I did not ice it as we prefer our cakes without icing. It was Christmas Eve when we decided to cut into it but sadly, inside the cake was very soggy and clearly not properly cooked. I quietly put it back into its tin and then away in the cupboard and no one dared talk about it again. A rich fruitcake contains a lot of ingredients and is not something you flippantly dump in the bin so I thought that after Christmas I might have mentally healed enough to be able to throw it away.

It was during a post-Christmas visit from my brother- and sister-in-law that I felt able to mention the undercooked cake for the first time. My sister-in-law suggested that maybe the gooey middle could be used to make "Bread Pudding". This wasn't something I was familiar with but when I mentioned it to my mum she told me that as a child she had had some bread pudding round at a friend's house, which she had enjoyed. When she got home she told her mum about this but her mum was very disapproving, saying, "Bread pudding is what you make when you can't afford to make a fruitcake." And that was the last time she ever had any.

With the options of either throwing the cake in the bin or possibly making it into something edible, I decided to investigate the bread pudding idea further. I found a Good Food recipe on the internet and when I examined it, I decided that the ingredients were pretty much what goes into a fruitcake plus bread and milk. It was the day before I normally shop so we were down to some pretty stale bread and some milk that would probably be off in a day or two so it seems like a good way to salvage the cake and use up bread and milk that otherwise might end up being thrown away too. So I cobbled together 500g of stale bread, minus crusts and a pint of past its best milk, tore up the bread and soaked it in the milk for about 20 minutes. Then I added 600g of the ridiculously undercooked Christmas cake. This I mashed and squelched between my fingers until it had transformed into a thick stodge that any Victorian pauper would have been grateful to receive. I then tipped and pressed it into a square cake tin and sprinkled Demerara sugar on to before cooking it for an hour and half. I'm pleased to say that it worked beautifully and we had Bread Pudding and custard for afters for the next few days. Far from being horrible, it was rather like a slightly lighter version of Christmas pudding.

Having made this, I was left with about half of the undercooked cake. I did wonder, as it was so underdone, if I could put it into a cake tin and just try cooking it again. I know that cakes generally don't work once they have failed but I didn't really have a lot to lose so I looked around for a smaller cake tin. Instead, I found one of my medium hemisphere cake tins so decided to pack the remaining cake into this. Once I had done that it occurred to me that it was now the shape of a Christmas pudding... so should I cook it in the oven to make cake or boil it to make pudding? Given that the structure of cake is a magical, mysterious thing that does not take well to being removed from an oven before time, I decided that boiling it might actually work better. Indeed, what is the difference between the ingredients of a Christmas cake compared to a Christmas pudding? The addition of breadcrumbs in the pudding might be the answer to that question. Well, would not the cooked outer parts of the cake crumble into crumbs? So I wrapped the tin in foil and boiled it for 3 hours. After a bit of cooling, I plopped it out onto a cooling rack to discover a perfect Christmas pudding - hemisphere shaped and darkly fruity!

So there you are, two rescue recipes and no cake in the bin!