The Baker's Dozen: Mary Berry's Mincemeat Loaf Cake

 

The Baker's Dozen: Mary Berry's Mincemeat Loaf Cake

So, this was a last minute change up. I had a recipe from my recipe collection but the instructions were essentially the same as last week's single-rise disaster, so I didn't want to do that again, knowing it most likely wouldn't work. I looked around at some of my other recipes but nothing stood out. I also have been wanting to use up some of my Christmas ingredients and have found some possible recipes to use up the jar of mincemeat in the fridge. One of them I selected was a quick bread recipe, which fits into this project, so I went with it. It's a snow weekend so I wasn't going to the store, and I happened to have all the ingredients here ready to go. I was able to use up the jar of mincemeat, as well as the rest of the green glaced cherries and made progress using up the red glaced cherries too, so it turned out to be a great way to use up ingredients! And since it's a snow weekend, it was fun to make a recipe that hearkens back to Christmas and made the apartment smell nice as it baked.

Since it's not my own recipe card, I won't type out the recipe. I'll paste the link to it here. Mary Berry is a famous British baker and was the star of several seasons of The Great British Bake Off, so it was fun to try her recipe and I am happy to say that it turned out really well!

I love it when the ingredients are all on hand! I didn't have the self-rising flour that it calls for, but it's very easy to find the proportions of how to make it yourself. Just google it rather than spend extra money on self-rising flour, especially if you don't use it that often.

Here is the mixed batter. I used the green glaced cherries instead of red because I wanted to use them up and wanted the red ones for the topping because I think they're prettier. They both taste the same.

It says you should put it in two regular loaf pans and I tried that but it was just too thin to even spread out on the bottom, really, so I combined them into one. It definitely adds time to the baking process, but it's worth it in the long run.

Here's my pretty topping design! I cut the cherries in half and set them into the top, then sprinkled the almonds around it all. I think it looks nice.

Post baking. I put foil on it towards the end to make sure it didn't over-brown as it continued to bake.

This bread really needs to cool before you cut into it. It was still warm when I cut into it and you can see how crumbly and almost gummy the texture is. I was worried that this was the final product.

But as you can see, it does cut very nicely once it's fully cooled. The texture firms up and holds up nicely. I highly recommend butter on it! It's very sweet, fruitcake-like, and tastes strongly like the mincemeat. This is a great quickbread! It would be so easy to make this at Christmas and take it to a party. It's basically "quick fruitcake." Mary Berry had a wonderful idea and it turned out perfectly!

If you like the flavor of mincemeat, you will love this. You have to be ok with cooked raisins, and I think leaving the glaced cherries out would be a mistake, though you could probably reduce the amount by half if you wanted. And use an online calculator to convert it from Metric to our measurements and do use a scale to make sure you get it exactly right. Measuring cups will be useless for this recipe.

Once you make sure all this is done, you'll be good to go! If you need a Christmas fix, this is your recipe! Give it a try!