Santa knows who's been good and who's been bad....
Here's cute little Rudolf, with his red nose. And my new letter stamp put into use..
Cake is chocolate fruit cake adapted from December 09 issue of 'Food and Travel - Kitchen Culture'. Original recipe is called ' Ebony and Ivory Christmas star cakes', containing a dark and light double layer fruit cake. I only made the dark layer. And here's the recipe.
Ingredients
1 cup cranberry
1 cup dates, seeded and sliced
1 cup currents
1/2 cup sultana
1 cup dried prunes
1/2 cup rum
60 gm butter
1/3 cup brown sugar
3 eggs, lighted beaten
1/2 cup chocolate chips or 2 tbsp cocoa powder
3/4 cup plain flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp bicarbonate soda
Steps
1) Mix dried fruits and rum and leave overnight
2) Pre- heat oven 150 degrees
3) In a second bowl, sieve dry ingredients
4) In a third bowl, mix butter and sugar to combine well, mix in eggs slowly until well incorporated
5) Fold in dry ingredients
6) Stir in rum-soaked fruits
7) pour into a 7 or 8 inch square tin and bake for about 1 hour. Start the skewer test at 45 min. If skewer comes out clean, cake is done
8) Take cake out of oven, use skewer to poke holes and brush with rum.
9) Continue to feed rum if desired
This is my first fruit cake and I used too big a tin, resulting in a very shallow cake. I was also too busy to check the cake and let it bake for an hour straight and the cake turned out a little dry and crumbly. Feeding of rum helped. What I liked about the cake is that its not too sweet.
