Ginger Wine Fruitcake With Caramel Royal Icing And Marshmallow Snowmen Decoration. Django Django Playing Loud.

Patient: “Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I m a snowman.”

Doctor: “Keep cool!”

Just one visit to I Sing In The Kitchen and you’ll suspect that I kind of love snowmen.

You will also gather that I love cake.

Oh, and then there is the caramel addiction.

So, this year for our Christmas cake I made this Ginger Wine Fruitcake With Caramel Royal Icing And Marshmallow Snowmen Decoration.

Adorable and, more importantly, very delicious.

The cake was much lighter than the heavy on the raisin versions I usually make. For my dried fruit I only used candied lemon and citron, which was a really nice change. Especially soaked in ginger wine for a few days to add a lovely, boozy hit to the cake.

Caramel Royal Icing was new to me, and a welcome change from the rather plain regular royal icing.

Then there are those Marshmallow Snowmen. The magazine I saw them in used them as a garnish for hot chocolate (which is a brilliant idea), but I thought they would be really cute to use to decorate the cake. And they were.

Ginger Wine Fruitcake With Caramel Royal Icing

250g (about 1 1/2 cups) mixed dried fruit
150ml ginger wine (such as Stone’s or Crabbies)
250g (2 cups) self-rising flour
1 teaspoon mixed spice
250g butter, softened
225g (1 1/2 cup) dark brown sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten
4 Tbs apricot jam (melted)
300g (11oz) Marzipan
Caramel Royal Icing (Recipe follows)

Directions:

1. Place dried fruit and ginger wine in a large airtight container. Mix well. Cover and stand overnight or as long as you like.

2. Preheat oven 180℃/350℉.

3. Line base and sides of an 8 inch round cake tin with 2 layers baking paper.

4. Using electric mixer, cream butter and sugar in a large bowl until pale and creamy. Add eggs, a little at a time, beating well.

5. Add flour, fruit and mixed spice to the butter mixture.

6. Spoon batter into cake tin. Smooth surface.

7. Bake for approximately 1 hour or until a tester comes out clean.

8. Remove cake from pan and store in cool dry air tight container or cake tin.

9. A day before you plan to ice the cake, brush with melted jam and cover with marzipan. (I wrote how to do this in this post)

10. Prepare icing and pour over cake. Let set and decorate with Marshmallow Snowmen (or not).

Caramel Royal Icing

Ingredients:

3 egg whites
500g (about 4 cups) icing sugar
1 tsp glycerine
3 Tbs caramel ice cream topping

Directions:

1. Beat egg whites in an electric mixer. Gradually beat in the sugar.

2. Add glycerine and caramel and mix well.

Recipe slightly adapted from Yum! Magazine

Marshmallow Snowmen

Ingredients:

5 ounces chocolate candy coating, melted
18 large marshmallows
6 small wooden skewers or lollipop sticks
Orange and black decorating icing (I used an orange food writing pen and a brown candywriter)

Directions:

1. For hats, spoon six 1/2-teaspoon rounds of candy coating onto waxed paper. Dip six marshmallows in remaining coating and place in the center of each round; let stand until set.

Note: Don’t let the chocolate get too hard, though, or it becomes difficult to thread through the skewer without cracking.

2. On each skewer, thread two plain marshmallows and one hat. Use decorating icing to draw faces and arms.