Fruit cake

It's hubby's birthday and time to try out the month long rum soaked fruits and nuts in a cake. The cake turned out moist and soft. Lesson learnt : whisk the egg white's separately to almost stiff peaks and add juice instead of milk.  

The recipe is adapted from one for traditional Keralite christmas plum cake. I didn't caramelise the sugar and that's why the cake does not have the brown color of a plum cake. Also, my fruits and nuts were soaked in maybe two or three drops of rum and so there was absolutely no extra liquor to add into the batter. I made variations from the base recipe also in the juice and jam used (making use of what I had in my refrigerator). The butter quantity also was almost halved (the weight conscious family that we are :D). With corona shows its faces in nearby places, we are more or less at home. So with minimal exercise, diet plays a bigger role ;-)

So these are my ingredients..

Dry..

All-purpose flour - 260g

Baking powder - 1 and 1/4 tsp

Baking soda - 1/2 tsp

Cloves - 4

Cardamom - 3

Nutmeg - 1/4 tsp

Cinnamon - 1/4 tsp

Fruit and nut mix (dry grapes, broken pistachio and walnuts) soaked in rum - 1 cup

Wet..

Butter, unsalted - 150g

Sugar - 230g

Organic eggs - 4

Vanilla extract - 1 and 1/2 tsp

Strawberry jam - 1 Tbsp

Cranberry juice - 1/2 glass

Discard the skin of the cardamoms. Grind the cloves, the inner seeds of the cardamom with a pinch of sugar. Add this and the rest of the spices into a bowl along with flour, baking powder and baking soda. Stir. Combine the fruit and nut mix with a little bit of flour, before adding to the dry bowl. This is so that the nuts do not sink when the cake bakes. But in my case, since they were not much soaked, I just mixed with a little bit of flour.

Grind granulated sugar to a powder. Add to another bowl, along with butter. Cream the mixture. Add the egg yolks and essence. Mix well. Add dry ingredients into wet bowl in batches. Stir to combine with a rubber spatula so that there no lumps. Add jam and stir.

Whisk egg whites to almost stiff peaks. Add to wet bowl. Stir to combine well. Add cranberry juice and combine to get a smooth batter.

Prepare cake tin by rubbing some butter on its insides. Sprinkle little flour and spread by tilting the cake tin. Pour batter into the center (it will slowly spread to the sides).

Preheat oven to 180C. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes.