Christmas Baking 2023

 As I write this blog, my house has been smelling a lot of Christmas since I started baking for this year Advent season (past 2 weeks)! This is in the context that I have done very little baking for the past six months due to busy schedule of work and travelling. Even our family birthdays, I would rather buy from Lady Bom Bom or just bake a very simple, no icing cake and to eat with ice cream. I mean for home bakers, the only special treats we can give to our "customers" is for them to taste hot freshly out of oven cakes and add on with cold ice cream, the combination of hot and cold just amazing ! 

Back to my Christmas baking saga this year, so much tuned down than before and not really selling much, but we did a bit of charity baking of cakes and cookies and also I gave a lot of cakes to friends and siblings as gifts. 

The challenging part was that I did not have a digital record of the mixed fruits recipe done up before. I lost 2 Recipe Folders that I have created over the years for Christmas and Festive baking and I have a few favourite recipes hand written in terms of how many butter portion so that I can just measure accordingly.  I managed to find the first original folder earlier in December but I quickly realised that the Mixed Fruits Recipes was too sweet after two rounds of baking (that is a lot of wastage). After I reduced the sugar and increased the flour portion, the cakes were less dry but the taste became almost the same as Prune Rum Cake with a stance of too much baking soda.  

Just as a record for future baking, here are the baking done this year, each using 5 Butter Blocks Portion. All started after I was back from office 8pm, 5pm, 6pm like that. 

Round 1 (20 Dec) - Prune Cake & Mixed Fruit Cake (double), so baked till like 4:30am

Mostly for 43 packs of Christmas Goodies for Golden Joy on 21 Dec and my mum-in-law Catholic Small Group gathering on 22 Dec. My girl baked the cookies all by herself, that was her charity project, and packed 47 packs of 4 big butter cookies.  

Round 2 (22 Dec) - Prune Cake & Mixed Fruit

I started to bake for some sales, some round cakes, I still find the Mixed fruits too sweet (after reduction of sugar). I ended up having 

5 boxes & 3 aluminium foil of Mixed Fruit with brandy 

4 boxes of Prune Rum Cake

 20 mini rectangles cakes (100 gram each) 

Round 3 (22-23 Dec) - Prune Cake (one round baking) 

2 Rounds - 750 gram

6 Rounds - 700 gram 

1 Round - 500 gram

Total for 5 Butters 25 Eggs Recipe yields 6200 gram !

This year I am selling 700 gram Cake in box for RM80. So one round of baking may raise RM640! The cost of one batch of Prune Cake ingredients estimated at RM120. 

Each round of baking both Prune Rum and Mixed Fruit Cakes will need 

10 blocks of 250 gram Butter (2.5 Kg) 

47 Eggs 

If I repeat the above 4 times, that be 

10 Kg Butter

188 Eggs 

Insane Amazing baking ! But I find it satisfying.