This year I decided to be brave and bake my own traditonal Christmas cake, if for none other reason than every other fruit cake I encounter in Europe (let alone Switzerland) has some form of nuts in it and I was getting pretty bored of being left out.
When the lovely NuttyCow reposted a link on Google Plus with a recipe in early November that gave me the nudge to get cracking. I decided to go with the 'longer-route' version as opposed to the reposted link of an equally good but quicker recipe. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed this baking journey - more surprisingly that I stuck with it and didn't get tired of it and abandon the brandy soaked fruit.

I used cranberries, prunes, currents, cherries and apricots which soaked in brandy for about 4 weeks, giving me just over 2 weeks to feed the baked cake with brandy.

The soaked fruit after a few weeks
My first time working with treacle - careful, its REALLY sticky! 
The parchment around the cake prevented the cake from getting to brown over the long baking process and would help with overflow if your tin is too low.
 The fun part of course was finally getting to decorate the cake just before Christmas. As I mentioned, I'm allergic to nuts so I didn't put a layer of marzipan inbetween the cake and the fondant. Instead, I heated smooth apricot jam with a good dose of brandy and coated the cake with the sticky mixture using it at 'glue' so to speak before putting on the fondant coat.
As you can see, I used a similar decorating idea to original recipe   adding a black ribbon around the cake and I made a snow man out of fondant, I think he's really cute!

Visit The Pink Whisk for the original (long version) recipe here - she's provided great step-by-step photos!, or if you prefer the impatient baker version English Mum has the shortcut ready.

I'm looking forward to sitting down with a cup of tea and a slice soon!