the $163 christmas cake

john is sometimes given to flights of culinary fancy . . . and sometimes to flights of british fancy. both of these tend to have lovely results, but when the two combine, the journey can be... well... a journey.

john's latest "british cooking project" obsession was a traditional british christmas cake. in case you, dear reader, are not british, think fruit-cake covered in marzipan, covered in white icing. optionally, decorated with little handmade marzipan christmas-y things.

the ingredients for a christmas cake are long and strange, and include things like candied lemon peel, candied cherries and black treacle. in the beginning, john refused to believe me that such oddities might be found at the local (gourmet) supermarket, and so he special ordered each and every single one of them from amazon.com for $30. then he got impatient, checked out the supermarket, which lo-and-behold the supplied all of the these ingredients, plus additional necessities such as three different kinds of raisins, plus brandy, drambuie and cointreau. i'm guessing all that added up to about $100.

the first stage of the actual cooking process was to combine all these ingredients and bake the cake. john and ava started this project on thanksgiving weekend.

after that were a couple of weeks of periodically "feeding" the cake more doses of alcohol.

and, finally, yesterday the cake was declared ready for decorating. so, off john went to the supermarket for marzipan. it took four tubes of marzipan to cover the cake, for a total price of $28.

after the marzipan-ing, the cake was iced and then decorated with marzipan trees and snowman (by yours truly). then it got a lovely sprinkling of sparking snow sugar ($5), and finally the $163 christmas cake was complete.

anybody care to buy a $5 slice?