Christmas Fruit Cake 2014

I like to have a slice of fruit cake once in a while. So, I thought of making one for Christmas this year. Hopefully it will taste good. It's now sitting in the fridge for the flavours to be macerated. Hmmmm....keeping my fingers crossed!

Ingredients

1 kg of mixed dried fruit - sultanas, raisins, cranberries, red cherries

90 g of orange peel 

250g of dried apricots-chopped

100g of strawberry jam

2 tbsps honey

60ml of brandy - I have used VSOP Cognac 

500g butter - softened at room temperature

400g brown / Demerara / Muscovado sugar

6 eggs

625g plain flour -sifted

1 tsp cinnamon (optional)

1 tsp nutmeg (optional)

4 tsps allspice (optional) 

Round baking pan size - 25cm/10 inch pan

or

Square baking pan size - 22 cm/9 inch pan

Method

1. Mix together dried fruit, orange peel, dried apricots, strawberry jam, honey and brandy. Let the mixture macerate for about 1 week or longer if you like. This mixture was left in the fridge for 1 month.
2. Stir the mixture with a wooden spoon everyday.
3. Preheat the oven to 140 degrees.
4. Lightly grease your baking tin and line the base and side. 
5. Use a hand mixer or KA, beat butter and sugar till combined.
6. Gradually, add in eggs (one at a time) and beat well, after each addition.
7. The mixture may look curdled but it's normal.
8. Use a spatula and stir in sifted flour in 2 batches. 
9. Stir in the fruit mixture and mix well. It's a little hard to move the spatula around but do make sure you have mixed them well.
10. Scoop the batter into the baking tin and level the surface. Tap the tin several times to remove any air bubbles in the mixture.
11. Wrap the baking tin with brown paper/ newspaper around the outside of the tin and tie it with a brown string. 
12. Place the baking tin on several pieces of folded newspaper/baking paper - in the middle rack and bake for about 2-3hrs.
13. Use a skewer -inserted into the centre of the tin, to check if the cake is done or not at around 2 hours and periodically after that, if it's not done. The skewer should come out clean.
14. Leave cake to cool in the tin by covering the top with a piece of non-stick baking paper and foil.

Storage: When it's cooled down, remove from the tin, wrap tightly in greaseproof paper, then plastic wrap and aluminium foil and store in the fridge for about 1 week before serving.

You can freeze it for up to a year. 

ENJOY!

I have used a smaller sized baking tin (thanks to hubby) and with the extra batter, I have used individual foiled tins and baked them at about 1 hour. The big one was baked for about 2 hours only.

* How do you line the baking tin?

Grease the pan and line with a layer of brown paper first at the side and then 2 layers of greaseproof paper on top of the brown paper. Line with greaseproof paper at the base. Line with brown paper/newspaper on the outside of the pan and secure it tightly with a string.

Recipe is adapted from thescarfer.net and my own preferences.