Holiday Hotcake with Eggnog Cream

My favourite Christmas special is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It's pure genius. Tonight was the first time I saw it this holiday season and I wanted to make it a really, really Christmasy experience. So I made Holiday Hotcake to eat while I watched this tonight.

I have to tell you that this maybe wasn't the best representation of this recipe. It was a last minute decision and so I just went with what I had in my cupboards. The main issue that I had was that of finding a jar of "mixed spice". Now I made an assumption that this was the English term for all spice but I didn't find any of that in my cupboard. What I did find though was "Jamaican Mixed Spice" this was a souvenir I picked up while on holiday in Montego Bay a while ago. I decided to go with it. I mean the jar said mixed spice so what if it said the word Jamaican in front of it right? I mean the English settled into Jamaica too. They could be the same thing for all I know. This is what I told myself but to be honest I wasn't really even buying my own bullshit. I decided I didn't care though. I'd roll the dice I thought...the Jamaican part of the mixed spice would make everything irie I decided.

So what you do when you make this is mix everything in a bowl except for 200g of sugar,1 tsp each of ginger and the mixed spice and the boiling water. Get it all combined and pour into a greased cake tin. Then you mix together your sugar and spices and put over top the cake batter. dollop with butter and then pour boiling water over everything in the cake pan. I screwed that part up. You see what I did was speed through the reading and pour the boiling water in with the sugar and spices. Then I realized that was wrong. At this point I considered dumping my bowl of boiling spicy sugar but then I thought no effing way. That's way too much ingredients to waste. I'm gonna roll the dice again and just dollop butter on the cake mix and pour this shit over the batter. So that's what I did. And I think it turned out pretty okay. It looked cakey coming out of the oven. It looked like a cake in soup coming out and I was tempted to put in back in the oven, but Nigella says let it rest for 10 minutes so I decided to so see how it looked after a short rest. That turned out to be a good decision because when I went back 10 minutes later everything looked tip top.

Making the Eggnog Cream was a little confusing for me. It's just whip cream with advocaat but it wouldn't whip for me. It did eventually but it took a while and I also realized it would never truly whip - it just becomes a very thick cream. Thick but still soft, Nigella describes it as.

So I scooped out some cake, spooned the sugary sauce at the bottom of the cake pan over top and then topped it all off with the eggnog cream. It was festive and delightful. I'm sure it would be even better if I'd used real mixed spice and not Jamaican mixed spice but I was happy enough with the result. Happy enough for 2 helpings as a matter of fact. Everything did turn out irie after all.