Helen Keown

Keeping the Christmas cake tradition alive is what the festive season is all about, says Helen Keown, who runs Gingergirl in Limerick.

Christmas actually starts in September for me every year. I start buying the ingredients and soaking the fruit, because for me making the Christmas cake is pure nostalgia and a tradition that I want to keep alive for my two little girls, Madeline and Kate.

I adored making the Christmas cake with my mother when I was a child. There were 11 in our house, but she was so organised and had beautiful tubs that we used for decanting the ingredients. I still remember her lovely neat handwriting on all the labels. Then there was the formality of soaking the fruit and, even now, that sweet smell of fruit and brandy is one of my favourite scents. I still do it the exact same way my mother did, all these years later.

When the mixture was ready, it was out with the parchment paper and the string. You see chefs like Nigel Slater thinking he is so trendy using his brown paper, but I sit there watching the TV thinking: ‘Come on Nigel, we were doing that 35 years ago’. We’d sneak a little bit of the mixture and eat it behind my mother’s back and made a wish.

Afterwards, we’d wrap it and put it into a dark cupboard. Truth be told, often it would be put under the bed. My mother would kill me for saying that. It would be brought out every few weeks, fed a bit of brandy and then off it went back into the wrapping again.

About a week before Christmas it would be carried like an Olympic torch to be decorated. Do you remember those gaudy Christmas decorations from the 70s and 80s? Sure we thought they were fantastic. There was the little reindeer, a small mirror that acted as a lake with ice and even a miniature Santa. Then all the marzipan would be wrapped in a red tartan ribbon.

Pretty soon, I’ll be bringing out our cake to decorate with my girls. I really want them to have all those happy Christmas cake memories, so in years to come when they smell that fruity scent, they’ll remember the fun we had in our kitchen.

Siobhan Lawless

For Siobhan Lawless of the Foods of Athenry, it’s all about the Christmas pudding.

Even though we make hundreds of Christmas puddings in our factory in Athenry, I still get a kick out of making my own. I remember as a child, my mother always made a pudding and back in the day there was no fancy steamers. Instead, you had a large saucepan and an upturned plate that the pudding would sit on and that silly plate used to rattle and rattle. It annoyed me like nothing else and mother was obsessed with checking that the pot of water wouldn’t go dry. I remember thinking: ‘Who would be bothered?’

Then I got married and I wanted to continue the tradition. Sure enough I had that stupid plate rattling away on the run up to Christmas, obsessively topping it up with water. When the Foods of Athenry really started to grow though, around 2002, we felt we had to start mass-producing puddings. We got this really large square saucepan that used to sit on the Aga. It fit 10 puddings instead of one and, best of all, it didn’t rattle. I thought all my Christmas’s had come at once. So for years this saucepan used to run right through the days and nights for weeks on end coming up to Christmas, filling our house with that malty smell, combined with the scent of fruit and spice.

What I didn’t know though was that we were creating Christmas memories for our kids. We did the batch bulk in the house for a good few years. However, in 2008 I think, we started doing them in the factory. I remember that year my son Cian came home from school in mid-December looking so upset, complaining that it simply didn’t feel like Christmas because there was no pudding smell.

So the next year, once December hit, I went back to the old-school way of that silly rattling plate, just to have the smell of Christmas pudding in the house for the kids. Now even though he is 20 and the rest of the kids are well into their 20s, we still have a bit of pudding in the house. I took a sneaky slice of it from the factory last week, so for me Christmas is officially here.

Margaret Jeffares

I never make Christmas cake says Margaret Jeffares of Good Food Ireland. My mother simply won’t allow me.

The Christmas cakes and puddings are my mother Teresa’s pride and joy, and every year she makes the cakes for all the family. She does such a good job, nobody could top it.

My mother has been making them for as long as I can remember. I was the only girl, so I remember we used start storing the eggs from the farm in September so there would be enough for making the cakes in early October. It’s a really special memory because it was just the two of us, soaking the fruit and stirring the mixture, with a light hand of course, as my mother says. Of course the really fun part was adding in the alcohol. The only time we used to see my brothers was when they were sticking their fingers into the mixture.

Now, even though my mother is 82 and I’m 20 years married, she still makes the Christmas cakes for us and my husband Des’s family. My brothers live in Canada and in Britain, and they would never go home after Christmas without a cake in their bag. She used to also do them for her brothers and sisters, as well as my mother-in-law, and there would always be two or three in her own house for whoever would call over during the holidays. The funny thing is, we even put in our orders. Some like theirs really rich, others like theirs lighter. My brother loves the icing, whereas I prefer to go without. Then the really special part is when she arrives to our house for Christmas with all her cakes. It’s like a little presentation, handing over this delicious gift, and then the anticipation of cutting it to see how it looks inside and how it has turned out. It’s such a special present from my mother that I cherish every year.