If I had been born in Dundee, I'd be feeling somewhat anti-Italian. It seems the bakers of Italy have stolen the limelight from the traditional fruit cake.

A panettone was a rare sight until 10 years ago. Now you can hardly open the door to a guest in the festive season without them thrusting one of those tackily gift-wrapped giant bath sponges studded with candied fruit towards you.

The chef Jeremy Lee, of the Blueprint Café, who was born and raised in Dundee, has hinted that it would do no harm to dust off the old Scottish favourite and its English equivalents. "Cakes with great ingredients add up to great cakes," he says. "They need to be made with butter and no other fat, but I sometimes worry we are turning our back on our traditions."

He likes panettone and other Italian dolci, "but only in Italy". Making a comparison between the invaders and the cakes of his childhood, he maintains we are overly impressed with novelty.

"It's like drinking bottled water when tap is perfectly good,'' he says. ''I grew up eating incredibly delicious rock cakes, lovely old-fashioned things everyone has forgotten. We need to get back to this type of thing."

Last week I made Christmas pudding and it's now maturing nicely in its bowl under a cloth. Using the remaining dried fruit store I decide to attempt a real old-fashioned fruit cake. Lee advises swapping some of the usual currants and raisins for other fruits: "It is worth spending the extra buck to get the good stuff."

I already have prunes, apricots, figs, golden sultanas and dried blueberries and a pack of those small, honeyed, sun-dried mini bananas (absolutely delicious and not to be confused with banana chips). Lee suggests buying whole almonds or pistachios then grinding them. "Whole is best – if you buy ready ground almonds the cake will not be as moist."

As with Christmas pudding, the cake will be better for being ''aged'' in an airtight container. Lee remembers how his mother Eileen's cakes, stored for weeks in a tin, improved all the time. "She would keep gingerbread for two to three weeks, but a cake for Christmas needs more," he says. "A minimum
of three weeks, but a maximum of six."

This vintage cake can be covered with marzipan and iced later on. Alternatively, brush with apricot glaze and decorate with candied fruit, for those that like it (although, as per the pudding last week, I promised the children not to put peel inside the cake, either).

One word of warning, issued simply because the high cost of the ingredients means failure is especially hard to take: this cake will take more than five hours to cook. Unless the tin is insulated from the temperature of the oven, the edges will be dry, or worse, burnt, even if they're cooked at a low temperature.

Paying attention to lining the cake tin with plenty of baking paper is as important with this recipe as not curdling the mixture.

By doing this you can also overfill the tin and end up with a cake that is nearly as tall as a panettone – but twice as delicious.