This recipe comes from one of my favourite books, Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking. There
are few food books that have such genuineness of tone, such love of food and of life. Laurie
Colwin died young, and I often think of her family, her daughter, whom she writes about
with such passion and interest. It’s an extraordinarily powerful legacy that she’s left her.

This cake was introduced to Laurie Colwin by her daughter’s West Indian
babysitter: ‘Its closest relatives are plum pudding and black bun, but it leaves both in the
dust. Black cake, like truffles and vintage Burgundy, is deep, complicated and intense.
It has taste and aftertaste. It demands to be eaten in a slow, meditative way. The texture
is complicated, too – dense and light at the same time.’ Here is the recipe, altered only
slightly by me.

for the fruit:
250g raisins
250g prunes
250g currants
250g natural-coloured glacé cherries
165g mixed peel (the real thing, not
the chopped stuff in tubs)
1/2 bottle Madeira
1/2 bottle darkest rum you can find

Chop all the fruit very finely in the food processor. I advise you to go slowly, one fruit at a time, or else you’ll find you’ve got purée.

Put the chopped fruit into a huge Tupperware and mix pleasurably and stickily with your hands to combine and then pour over the Madeira and rum. I should perhaps say that Laurie Colwin suggested Passover wine, but unless you’re doing this around Easter/Passover you’ll never find it; and Madeira is, I’m told, the best substitute for it.

Cover the fruits and leave to steep for at least two weeks, but up to six months. I say up to six months – which is what Colwin writes in Home Cooking – but I must tell you that I steeped all the fruits one year in November only to find in December that I was just too exhausted to make the cake. So I used it up the following year, after 13 months’ marinating. It was strong, but it was good.

for the cake:
250g soft unsalted butter
250g dark muscovado sugar
the marinated fruit mixture
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
6 large eggs
275g plain flour, preferably Italian 00
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
125g black treacle

deep, 23cm cake tin, lined as for Christmas cake

Preheat the oven to 180ºC/gas mark 4.

Cream the butter and sugar, and beat in the fruit, rum and wine mixture. I use my KitchenAid free-standing mixer for this: it wouldn’t be impossible to do by hand, but it takes a lot of muscle. Add the vanilla, nutmeg and cinnamon, and then beat in the eggs. Stir in the flour and baking powder, and finally the black treacle. The batter should be dark brown.

Pour this dark batter into the prepared tin and cook for 1 hour, then turn the oven down to 170º/gas mark 3 and cook for a further 2 1/2 –3 hours. Remove to a wire rack but do not unmould till the cake’s completely cold, at which stage, wrap it in a double-thickness of foil and put it back in a Tupperware until you want to ice it.

for the icing:
1 /2 jar marmalade (about 200g)
icing sugar for sprinkling
500g marzipan
1kg ready-to-roll icing
1 pair of holly-leaf cutters

I was teased mercilessly last year for proposing my white-on-white holly-decorated Christmas cake, but as precious as it sounds, it is simply beautiful. And I promise you those who at first mocked, ate their words and my cake.

I don’t think there is anything better than an all-white cake – especially with an interior as dense and dark as this one’s – but you could easily cut holly leaves out of dark green icing if you wanted. Holly-leaf cutters tend to come in pairs – a smaller and a larger leaf – complete with vein-stamping truc. The berries you have to roll yourself, but for this I suggest in any case you buy the icing ready to roll. Of course you can whisk sieved icing sugar with egg whites until it’s the right consistency to roll out and ice, but the bought stuff, especially if it comes from a cake-decoration shop, is fine.

Heat the marmalade in a saucepan and when hot and runny strain into a bowl to remove rind. With a pastry brush, paint all over the cake to make a tacky surface. Dust a work surface with icing sugar, roll out the marzipan and drape over the cake. Then press against the cake and cut off the excess with a sharp knife. If you need to do this twice (with two lots of 250g marzipan), that’s fine, but make sure to smooth over any joins, so that the icing on top lies smoothly. Dust the work surface again with icing sugar and plonk down your block of icing. Beat it a few times with the rolling pin, then dust the top with icing sugar and roll out. Cover the cake with it, again cutting off the excess and sticking bits together to patch up as you need, sprinkling with cold water first. Transfer the cake to a cake stand or board: once you’ve added the leaves you really don’t want to move it again.

Re-roll the remaining icing and start stamping out the larger holly leaves (dipping the cutter into icing sugar first) and pressing down on them with the vein-stamper. Wet the underneath of each with a little cold water and stick onto the cake to form a circle about 3cm in from the cake’s edge. Don’t make all the holly leaves face the same way: you want this to look a bit like a holly wreath, which means that although most leaves should be placed aslant, they shouldn’t be in a uniform ring. Now do the same with the smaller leaves, sticking them to make a circle around the base of the cake, in other words, blurring the line between cake board and cake. Make tiny balls, to resemble the berries, out of some of the icing that remains. Again, don’t be uniform about the way you stick them on: put one berry between some leaves, a bunch of three between others, and so on.