For as long as I can remember my mum baked a fruit cake for Christmas. It was her signature bake and everyone who has ever had the fortune of being fed her cake swears by it. She never claimed it as her own or her mother's (duh my grandma never baked), she found a recipe in a magazine (may have been the iconic Vanitha) and tried it. It may have been by Mrs. Thangam Philip the pioneer of hospitality education in India. She followed the recipe and the only change was doubling and sometimes even tripling the quantities to feed everyone. It was truly a labour of love for her. Involved an entire day as she would start by beating the butter and sugar by hand for hours on end. Back in the day she didn't have a Kitchen Aid or a stand mixer, just an old Kenwood cake mixer. For the kilos of butter and sugar she needed to beat till smooth and pale, only her hands worked. And boy did she work up those muscles!!

She would powder kilos of sugar a day before, make her caramel in advance and packets of butter would be left overnight to soften. She always started her baking with a prayer and would start about 6 am. And then she would sit for hours and beat by hand the butter and sugar - from memory she did that for at least 3-4 hours. For me she is the epitome of multi-tasking - beating butter & sugar with the right hand and our home phone in the left hand attached to the ear chatting to her friends. Oh gosh I will never forget those days - she giggled and chatted and beat the butter and sugar with equal fervor. Bless her, she never finished her baking till 10 pm!

Of course she would always soak her fruits in Old Monk Rum for at least 3 weeks. She swore by the smoky flavor of Rum and never ever used another liquor - that too Old Monk. Brand conscious my Ma, Lol! Also she stuck to raisins and nuts and orange peel, never used anything else in her fruit cake. And what a treat it was to see those plumped up raisins soaking in rum. We kids loved to taste the rum that had been soaking the raisins when Mum was not watching. Also rumor has it that my Dad and some Uncles used to drink the sweet rum, of course they got caught, then Dad learnt to replace more rum into the fruit, oh joy!

The bit that irritated me the most - separating yolk from egg white! Sometimes she had 18 eggs and oh her patience to ensure not a single bit of shell fell into a bowl. And then beating those egg whites to a stiff peak with her tiny hand mixer. Looking back I wonder how hard it must have been for her. But she looked forward to December just to bake her beloved Christmas cake and share it with the world. She never had social media to glorify herself or her work, only people raving about Emily's Plum Cake (never understood why it was called a plum cake when it never had plums in it)

In the early days of baking her fruits always sank to the bottom of the cake and she never knew why it was. I now know the reason - 3 hours of beating air into butter and sugar, lol! Later on she read that she needs to dust her fruits with flour before adding it to batter and voila her world was right again. Any reserve rum from the soaking fruits was always my Dad's quota of alcohol. And the batter pan was reserved for us kids to lick clean - salmonella be darned! She always added red glaće cherries as decoration on the top and then poured a bit more rum as the cakes came out of the oven. And that was it - no royal icing, no frosting, no fancy decoration - just a good old naked fruit cake! Ah but how delicious it was - light, airy, smoky with a slight kick from the rum. This is truly what our Christmas memories were made of.

Her work wasn't done, she would then spend all of the following day slicing the cakes and packing them in foil to distribute to friends and family. That was also a day we kids looked forward to, because there would be lots of crumbs from the cake pans to fight over. We always went without enjoying much of Mum's epic cake because it was always reserved to feed others during the season of giving. And that my friends is how I learnt it is more joyful to feed than to be fed. Merry Christmas y'all!