“It was very good, but they had to take a chisel to the icing, it was so hard.”It’s a very easy cake to make, but you must follow the instructions carefully. “I told a friend about this, and she rang me up in the middle of making it, saying the mixture had turned into a bowl of liquid. No problem in most recipes, but infuriating in recipes for cakes where imprecise measurements can mean the difference between success and failure.Fiona’s recipe is the one she learnt at school aged 13 (in Denbigh, North Wales) and took home to her amazed family for Christmas. You may wish to decorate it with marzipan and icing in the usual way; or you could decorate in the style of Sisi Edmiston, embedding clusters of the glace fruits and or nuts in a jam base; then glazing it with a strained mixture of hot jams.FIONA BURRELL’S CHRISTMAS CAKEA sure sign that Fiona’s Christmas cake recipe is authentic is that it is conceived in imperial measures; metric measures are approximations.

Twenty years after decimalisation, cookery writers still have to be if not bilingual, biquantifying, rounding-up and rounding down as they translate from one code to the other. It needs a few weeks to settle or else it will just be a sticky slab. And alcohol really does need several months to do its magic, otherwise it will be simply raw.So here is a recipe for a Christmas cake that will do the trick. It’s from Leith’s Book of Cakes by Fiona Burrell (Bloomsbury, pounds 16 99). She applies a dense glaze made by heating and straining equal parts of damson, apricot and plum jam.

For sale, she wraps them, like a bouquet, in cellophane.For advice on availability of her cakes (but it may be a bit late in the day) phone Sisi Edmiston on 0171-229 6722, fax 0171-792 8092.There is still time to make a fruit cake for Christmas, though not one with such a high density of fruit as Sisi’s. “Health food shops all seem to be managed by religious groups, so you get these signs saying ‘Jesus Lives’. Inside these great warehouses they are playing religious muic.” But they know their fruit and nuts, and as well as being religious, ethical and organic, their stuff tastes better than anyone else’s. (Community Foods at Brent Cross (0181-450 9411, north London, is a favourite supplier of hers.)Her cakes are not to be iced, of course, but the finish is breathtaking.

“My papa is the Banana King (though mama is a brain surgeon) There every valley has a different crop of fruit. It used to be citrus, but now it’s pecans, mangoes, avocados, bananas.”As it’s impractical to make a return visit to papa, she goes to local wholefood shops to buy her dried fruit No one sells better, she says. She comes from a Garden of Eden, she says, in the valleys of north-east Transvaal, South Africa. Large crystallised melon peel, called pepno, has a subtle lime-green hue. She also uses dull brown dried figs, which she butterflies open to reveal their speckled caviar of seeds.It’s not only the cakes’ appearance that is stunning So is their quality Sisi knows her fruit.