For once, I have baked the year’s fruitcake before the first Sunday in Advent. It’s been doused with brandy and wrapped in plastic clingfilm, and by the end of the week I will have packed the outbound specimens in the relevant Christmas parcels for postage to parts else.

For most of my cooking life — some fifty-five years — I have listened while experts prosed away on the subject of flour: pastry flour, cake flour, bread flour, all-purpose flour. I get that the texture of many, perhaps even most, baked goods depends on choosing the right kind of flour, but fruitcake is definitely not one of them.

My recipe calls for all kinds of fancy stuff — two special kinds of raisins, unsalted butter, black treacle, kosher salt, free-range eggs, freshly ground nutmeg — but over the years I have abandoned all that and made it with ordinary no-name butter, basic molasses, and whatever raisins happen to be on special at Bulk Barn. This year, I replaced the cake flour (of which I had none) with the last of Edmund’s bread flour that had been sitting in the pantry for two years, and I think it may be the best batch yet.

Apparently, the only thing fruitcake really cares about is oven temperature — it has to be 275° Fahrenheit. Everything else is negotiable.