Front Cover -- Title Page -- Half Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. Origins of the Christmas cake -- The evolution of fruit cakes in prehistory -- Cakes and ingredients in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire -- English cakes from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries -- 2. In search of the seventeenth-century twelfth cake -- Samuel Pepys's twelfth cake -- The seventeenth-century twelfth cake -- Cake 1. Sir Kenelm Digby's Recipe 'To make an Excellent Cake' (1669) Icing Festive Cakes in the Seventeenth Century -- 3. Eighteenth-century twelfth cakes and the baking revolution -- Recipes for eighteenth-century fruit cakes -- Cake 2. Hannah Glasse's Recipe 'To Make a Rich Cake' (1747) -- Icing festive cakes in the eighteenth century -- 4. From twelfth cake to Christmas cake -- Twelfth cake recipes in the nineteenth century -- Nineteenth-century recipes for Christmas cakes -- Changes in fruit cakes in the nineteenth century -- Cake 3. Isabella Beeton's 'Christmas Cake' (1861) -- Icing festive cakes in the nineteenth century -- 5. Christmas cakes in twentieth-century New Zealand -- Christmas cake size and ingredients in the twentieth century -- Types of twentieth-century Christmas cakes -- Variations in twentieth-century Christmas cake ingredients -- 6. Christmas cakes from the last hundred years -- The cake that put on weight -- Cake 4. Edmonds' Christmas Cake -- A 'Black Cake' transformed - Mrs Harman & Mrs Gard'ner's recipe -- Cake 5. Christmas or Wedding Cake -- To Ice or Not to Ice - Christmas Cakes in the Twentieth Century -- A home-grown country cake? Tui's & Aunt Daisy's blackcurrant cakes -- Cake 6. Howick Christmas Cake -- Making do with fewer eggs -- Cake 7. 2-Egg Custard Christmas Cake -- A trans-Tasman import? -- Cake 8. Ginger Ale Christmas Cake -- Breaking with tradition - the pineapple Christmas cake.

Cake 9. Dark Christmas Cake -- One challenge and four solutions -- Cake 10. Sweetened Condensed Milk Christmas Cake -- One Christmas cake, ten names -- Cake 11. Christmas Jewel Cake -- Making 'healthy' Christmas cakes -- Cake 12. Festive Fruit Cake -- 7. So what Christmas cake will we make this year? -- Recipes for Icings -- Hints for Making Rich Fruit Cakes -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.