Wouldn’t you just know it? Christmas cake, as in dense fruitcake covered with marzipan and usually tooth-destroying royal icing, is being displaced by chocolate cake. Almost half of a sample of 2,000 people surveyed by Ocado said they’d prefer chocolate to fruitcake.
The trend is represented by Nigella Lawson, who is making something called a Winter Wonderland chocolate and raspberry cake instead. ‘Much as I happen to love a slice of dense, damp Christmas cake, especially when eaten with a crumbly slice of good, strong, sharp cheese, I am surrounded by those who abominate dried fruit in all its seasonal manifestations,’ she writes. ‘If no one in your family likes dried fruit, there’s no point having a Christmas cake gathering dust.’
That’s the problem: dried fruit, as in currants, raisins and sultanas, prized ingredients since Crusader times and, with spices, the default element of cake for centuries, is being inexorably edged out by the ubiquitous ingredient of this generation, chocolate.
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