First she baffled her legions of fans by extolling the virtues of frozen mashed potato and pre-boiled eggs.
Now Delia Smith has taken cutting corners in the kitchen to new levels by throwing away what she describes as ‘possibly the most popular recipe I’ve ever done’.
Miss Smith is ditching her Classic Christmas Cake recipe, painstakingly followed by cooks up and down the country since it was published in 1978, in favour of a do-it-yourself ‘ingredients pack’.
Christmas wrapped up: Delia's ingredients pack will cost just £10, compared to the £23 cost of buying all 24 ingredients for the Christmas cake seperately
The cake has been simplified from a complicated process started weeks before Christmas into an easy three-step method.
She says it means even those who have no cooking experience will be able to produce the perfect Christmas cake. It is the first time the TV cook has ever transformed one of her recipes into an ‘at home’ ingredients box.
The pack will cost just £10 – compared to the £23 cost of buying all 24 of the ingredients separately.
And it will contain all the original components including currants, brandy, flour, treacle and sugar.
Only eggs, butter, an orange and a lemon need to be bought fresh.
‘Here, precisely the same recipe has been unbelievably simplified,’ said Miss Smith, 69, the country’s best-selling cookery author, who has sold more than 21million cookbooks to date.
‘There is no need to shop for, or weigh out, a long list of ingredients. All you do is empty the packs into a bowl, mix it together, and bake.’
How to cheat: Delia claims that even those with no cooking experience will now be able to produce the perfect Christmas cake using her ingredients pack
None of the ingredients needs to be prepared in advance and the fruits have been pre-soaked in brandy.
And cooks can even avoid the tricky task of pouring out the right amount of treacle – because it comes pre-measured in a sachet.
The packs will be available at branches of Waitrose from November 11.
Miss Smith’s decision to throw away her beloved Christmas cake recipe comes after she horrified viewers in 2008 with her comeback BBC cookery show.
In How to Cheat, she made a salmon and quail egg pie using ready-boiled and pre-shelled eggs and pre-cooked fish.
soruce:dailymail