Help! - salt in Christmas cake!!

You could cover it in a caramel coating of some sort - salted caramel!
Take no notice of me, I'm no cook.
Hope you can salvage it.

Oh heavens, not the kind of "help" you were hoping for 😧. But if there was really only "a hint" of salt, then I would go for the lashings of brandy, which surely will mask it 🙏🤞

I've just read online that acid can help neutralise salt in food. It was really talking about savoury food, if you'd over seasoned it, but I wonder if it might be worth adding some lemon juice along with the brandy?

Could you take a slither off the cake and try it and see how it tastes?

A clean knitting needle and brandy.

But don't let him eat the finished cake!

I use my Dairy cook book for my christmas cake.
About two years ago I put in far to much chocolate powder when it should have been one level teaspoonful it was quite strange in taste but not as bad as salt would be.
This year I hope I was more careful.
Stuff happens.

Oops..... Trouble is a rich fruit cake has a lot of quite expensive ingredients.

As Momb suggests, try a sliver. You could level the top off and taste that.

Oh heck. Had it been an ordinary cake it could have been dumped, but------
There's not a lot that can be done really and if it's really noticeable in the cake then that's that. What a shame.
You'll just have to hope that the fruit absorbs it.

You might start a new trend! Who knew that salted caramel would become so popular!

Yes - I am hanging on to that idea - I could be on trend!

I think I will cut a small amount off from the edges and see how it tastes. Fingers crossed!

No good deed goes unpunished!
I think that a small sliver won't give you the answer - you really need a good mouthful so you can taste all of the ingredients together.
This is what I would do:
If a round cake, cut it into a square- if a square or oblong, easier to take a slice off.
If OK, then definitely feed with brandy, and wrap very tightly.
If it really isn't right, then I would crumble it, mix with enough melted margarine to roll into balls (you can also add some ground almonds to help it all stick together) and make mini Xmas cakes. Decorate with little fondant holly leaves.
I also remember my mother using a stale fruit cake, crumbled, and mixed with diced apple & suet to make 'fake' Xmas pudding!
good luck!

Great advice from Nannarose and others. I was wondering whether you could take a "core" sample from the side or bottom, using an apple corer?

This is probably no help at all but I once added salt to a soup (senior moment) when I don't normally add salt to anything and a friend suggested adding tatties to the soup because they would take up the salt. It certainly worked! I can't think what similar neutralising agent you could add to a cake - or how you would do it - but I like the idea of the caramel icing. That's such a modern and popular twist. Good luck.

You could add lemon juice to the icing when you get that far, as well as adding it and brandy to the cake. If you make your own icing, I would stir it up with lemon juice instead of water, and use tart jelly under the marcipan, crab apple or rowanberry and apple for preference.

If your cake is still too salt, it will go down in family history, as the year GS helped Grannie make the Christmas cake, and as some Roman soldier, stuck in mud to his knees said to his companion, "Perhaps one day this memory will make us laugh" What he actually said was, "Forsan, olim et haec meninisse juvabit!" in case anyone was wondering.

At least he didn't substitute salt for sugar completely, as I once did when making a sponge cake. I was about 12 at the time, I think.
I agree with those who say try to compensate with a sweet icing, marzipan etc.

mumofmadboys. Agree as this will determine is it ok or should we 'count our losses' and start again

I have the idea to take a small "core" from the centre and use that as a test. I can always fill that with icing later.

Good idea to taste it, better to cut your losses rather than finish a cake with more expensive ingredients that is inedible.

What you could do is to use a sweet liquor to soak it in instead of the brandy. Would still help it mature with the alcoholic content but would give added sweetness.

Or sweet sherry (cheaper too!). Mix it half and half with the brandy then feed it with the mixture. If you are going to finish it with marzipan and icing you may not notice it at all. Well, you might because you know it's there but your guests might well not -- especially if you give them a generous glass of sherry or Madeira to wash it down with!

DD and I cut the edges off the cake and did a taste test today! You can detect it - it is saltier than one might expect - but will be fine with lots of icing etc. And of course lots of brandy/sherry!

In future I will make sure that the salt is moved back to the cupboard instantly when cooking with DGS! - and thank you for all your useful suggestions.

Rum, whisky, brandy...the lot. Just make sure that nobody is driving after eating it (seriously)

Make sure no one with salt problems eats it , personally I would start again . My SIL is having BP problems and salt is banned in their house