Imagine you are a little girl helping your mother put the finishing touches on the Christmas cakes. Your mother has allowed you to help make the cakes which are given as gifts to family and friends this year, and you are very excited to be involved. You love to cook, and Christmas cake is such a central part of Christmas celebrations – you feel very special to be allowed to help make and decorate it! Your mother even let you choose the paper band which will be put around the cakes this year and you had such fun together selecting the perfect pattern. You can’t wait to see the completed cakes!
When I showed the children these Christmas cake wrappers they were quite confused. They recognised the Christmas theme but had no idea what the simple strips of paper could have been used for. They were amazed to discover they would have been used to wrap around a Christmas cake, either to decorate the Christmas table or to give as a gift. They thought the idea was a lovely one and as one child said ‘I think they should sell those today – they’d be great!’
Christmas cake (being a cake full of spices and dried fruit) has a fascinating and long history dating back to the early years of the Christian era. However, this forerunner of the Christmas cake was not really a cake at all but a porridge – plum porridge. The porridge was eaten on Christmas Eve to line the stomach after a long day of fasting and as time went by spices, dried fruits and honey were added to create a more luxurious dish in honour of the celebration. Eventually, there was so much fruit and spice inside that the porridge became a pudding, being tied in a cloth and boiled for hours. This is where Christmas Pudding comes from. In the 16th century though many people replaced the oats with flour and added butter and eggs – creating a Cake, though it was then known as plum cake. This cake was very exclusive as the ingredients were very expensive and only fine houses had an oven in which it could be baked. The spices and exotic fruits were very significant though, representing the gifts of the wise men and the east, from where they came.
The cake was not a Christmas Cake though, but a Twelfth Night Cake, served on the 5th of January to celebrate the end of the Christmas season or even reserved until the 6th and served to Priests who would visit for the feast of the Epiphany to bless the parish houses. So how did this cake become Christmas cake? After the Reformation in Britain the Twelfth Night celebrations became frowned upon by Puritans and in 1870 Queen Victoria actually banned the feast day. The confectioners who made the cakes were left with sugar figurines and out of pocket, but they quickly hit upon a solution. They baked the cakes but decorated them with snowy scenes, flower gardens and romantic ruins and then sold them to people for their Christmas celebrations in December. The Christmas cake was born, as was the tradition of decorating them. As time went by and housewives began to bake their own cakes to be used at their own feasts or given as gifts a new market for cake shops emerged in selling readymade decorations which could be used to decorate the cakes – including the vintage paper bands (from circa 1950s) which I showed the children.