Made it for this year. The van Reyk matriarch has approved both the texture and the flavour.Even approved me chucking all the fruit and nuts that used to have to be chopped by hand into a good sturdy electric whirring chopping thingy which may be why the texture won her approval - beautifully fine shreds of the fruit mice mixed in with the semolina to give a fine grainy most texture. I am sure my granny, whose recipe this is, would have been more than happy to give up the knife and arduousness and just press on and let the machine whirr while she go onto other parts of the cake prep that can't be done with a machine, like buttering the greaseproof paper line of the baking tin (I use that new fangled baking paper but am attached to buttering it anyway).
Mind you at some stage in the transition from gran to mum to me I do recall a hand turned bench top mincer coming into play also, so it's not as if I am working outside of a family tradition. Also somewhere long the way mum began using an elective mixer for creaming the butter and sugar and then adding in the semolina. I have followed this practice also much as I would love to fantasise about kids sitting around a big copper bowl mixing creaming away as I did when young on our kitchen table. Again, it's majorly handy to be able to give this job over to a machine while I get on with other bits of the prep.I have retained hand beating the egg whites, however. I have succumbed far enough to using a rotary hand operated beater rather than a whisk, but for the eggs moving to the electric whisk seems just that step too far. Or maybe it's just that expending SOME effort in the making is still sort of gastro-morally necessary.
I also have retained grinding the spices in a mortar and pestle. This is mainly because the quantity is so small that I would never be able to grind it fine enough in my Sumeet, that extraordinary kitchen companion that South Asian cooks rhapsodize about, and which lives up to its hype for grinding spices and turning out perfectly blended mint chutney.
As is putting it all together. I use a bowl which seems smaller to me than the one gran used but then I am bigger than the 7 year old who sat cross-legged with what was to him a cauldron into which gran dropped handfuls of the fruit mince mix and sprinklings of the spices. And the bowl is a good steel one. But I do still enjoy getting a wooden spoon and turning over and over this thickening mass of batter, and let me assure you that it is a wrist-straining effort at first till you add in the required small amounts of pineapple juice, honey, brandy and rose water at which point it gets slightly easier.
The mixing becomes easiest when the beaten egg whites are added. I recall when I first came across the direction to 'fold' egg whites into something and I had no idea what on earth that meant, or more accurately how much folding I was supposed to do - till the egg white was totally integrated? wouldn't that just defeat the whole purpose of beating air into them? fold while leaving some lumps of egg white sitting there surly? would that lead to meringue pockets in the cake? As it is I have move to the well-integrated position and the cake is none the worse for this.
We didn't have an oven at home, and gran used to take the ready to bake mixture across the road to her cousin's house for the final transforming. She used to use the browning paper test to check the heat of it; I am more confident that my electric oven will deliver the right heat.
The trick with getting the right moistness and firmness is that once the cake has set enough that when pressed gently on top it stays firm, turn the oven off and let it finish cooking as the oven cools. If you have used the six layers of greaseproof and the extra layer on top the recipe calls for, the cake won't burn as it finishes and you don't run the risk of burning it by waiting, waiting, waiting till you reckon it's ready.
If you want to make this yourself, and you really should give it a go if you like fruit christmas cakes that take several steps away from the ordinary, then you can find the recipe here under Cake 1 in the right hand drop down menu.
http://www.buthkuddeh.com.au/index.php?pageid=3102
I've written more about my gran and her cookbook and reflections on the foodways of a Sri Lankan Dutch Burgher at http://www.buthkuddeh.com.au/index.php?pageid=3499
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