Spread the love

Jump to Recipe Jump to Video Print Recipe

This Fruit Cake post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclaimer.

To be honest, fruit cakes with dried fruit mix can sometimes be too dry and too sweet. I am talking about those commercially sold in supermarkets and some bakeries. Thus for the longest time, I am not a big fan of fruit cake. When I started learning baking, one of the first few things I made was a fruit cake, which is traditionally made using a long-drawn, multiple-step, laborious recipe, then preserved it over a couple of weeks before serving.

Baking is an impulse thing for me, thus I didn’t make the alcoholic dried fruit mix in advance. In this fruit cake recipe, I heat-soaked the dried fruit mix — simmering the dried fruit mix with juice and added alcohol, then let it soak and cool completely before adding to my cake batter. I used cognac, an exquisite french liquor as that’s the only opened bottle I have in my alcohol cabinet. If you have brandy, or rum or even whiskey, feel free to use them. Or if you prefer a non-alcoholic version, use orange juice, apple juice or even mango juice. Yes! I tried using mango juice and it tasted great!

This fruit cake recipe is after several rounds of trial-and-error. It is super moist, and of course, with alcoholic soaked dried fruits, honey, butter, oil added. I substituted sugar with the demerara unrefined cane sugar which has a slightly roasted bitter taste to it. All these contributed to the moist and not-so-sweet flavour profile of the cake.

I do not want to wait for weeks before I can eat it. This cake is made all on the same day, a shorter wait of 2 full days to let the flavour develop before savouring it. It’s really quick and easy.

When is fruit cake eaten?

Fruit cakes remind me of Christmas and breakfast! During Christmas season, supermarkets will start selling boxed up Christmas fruit cakes, and some brands I found are quite moist and very very sweet! When I was little, my mummy will sometimes buy slices of fruit cakes from the local bakery store and I will eat it for breakfast with a cup of warm Milo. In Singapore where I live, fruit cakes can be bought quite cheaply from local bakeries, and as expected they are not made of quality dried fruits nor butter nor flour. And it’s dry in most cases as I mentioned above.

What is fruit cake made of?

Many of the ingredients I used here are pretty similar to those I used to make this Spiced Apple Cake.

Dry ingredients – plain flour and fine salt. Spices such as cinnamon powder, nutmeg powder, allspice powder, all of which gives the festive flavour profile to the fruit cake.
Wet ingredients – eggs, a neutral flavoured vegetable oil, Manuka honey (can be substituted with molasses or golden syrup), butter for that buttery profile, and demerara unrefined cane sugar (to replace sugar)

Dried fruit mix – I used a mixture of sultanas and raisins, and grab whatever dried fruits I can find in the supermaket near me. What I added in this recipes are dried guava, dried preserved ginger (yum!) and dried prunes. I added cognac and orange juice to the mix. You can use rum, whiskey, brandy instead of cognac, basically I used whatever alcohol bottle that is opened in my cabinet. For the juice you can also use apple juice or mango juice to replace orange juice, they all work and are equally yummy!
Decoration – I watered the cake with cognac after baking. Before serving, you can decorate the cake with fruits and nuts. I simply used cherries in this recipe.