What Butter Should I Use For The Traditional Christmas Cake?

Our answer

Nigella's Traditional Christmas Cake (from NIGELLA CHRISTMAS) comes with ingredient quantities for three different sizes of cake, so that you can make one that is appropriate to your scale of celebration. For most recipes if just "butter" is stated then it means salted butter, and unsalted butter is usually specified as such.

For most baking we would tend to prefer to use unsalted butter and add salt (or not) to the recipes, as this gives much more control over the final flavour. However, the proportion of butter to other ingredients is fairly low in rich fruit cakes, so it matters less here. We would therefore suggest using whichever butter you have in your fridge and if you use unsalted butter then you may like to add a pinch or two of salt to the cake batter when you make the cake.