My cousin recently got engaged after a whirlwind romance; and the wedding is in a few weeks. I volunteered to make their cake as my gift to her and her lovely soon-to-be-husband. She particularly wanted a Nigel Slater fruit cake recipe, round cakes, and three tiers. I asked her if she wanted pillars or not (as they are were all going to be fruit cakes they could be stacked without pillars) and she said "I think I want pillars because it's not sensible!" I already had 8" and 9" round tins in the cupboard and borrowed a 10" one from a lovely lady in the village, thanks to the wonders of social media.
The first challenge was that the recipe was for a little 11cm square cake, and I needed to make three larger round ones. It was at the point of conversion that I nearly got my inches and centimetres mixed up, but thankfully I realised fairly early on. In the end I used the ingredient quantities from my well-loved cake "bible" but tweaked them to match the Nigel Slater recipe by adding orange zest and juice,swapping whole almonds for hazelnuts, adding ground almonds, and changing the spice mixture (nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice). I added a tweak of my own by adding vanilla liqueur to the dried fruit soaking mixture as well as brandy and the orange flavours.
After soaking raisins, sultanas, currants and cherries in brandy, vanilla Galliano and orange juice/zest in a big storage box for two days, I creamed nearly a kilo of butter and nearly a kilo of light/dark muscovado sugars and added 13 eggs. The kitchenaid couldn't quite cope so I had to take some of the mixture out partway through and add the eggs to the remaining mixture as it was also going to be mixed again later. Then I mixed the butter and sugar into the dried fruit plus ground almonds and whole hazelnuts. Then over a kilo of gluten free plain flour was incorporated (gf according to the bride and other guest requirements), plus baking powder and the spices.
Mixture done and arm muscles protesting, I divided the mixture between the tins, which had been lined earlier and brown paper put round the outside to protect from burning. You can't tell from the photos but I recycled a clean and opened out KFC bag for the biggest cake!
They were baked at 140 degrees C for 3 hours (small) 3 and a half hours (middle) and 4 hours (big) and left to cool in the tin. The smell was amazing!
They are cooling as I type and will have marzipan,icing and decoration added soon... to be continued in Part 2... in which I will hopefully be having enormous fun with my new piping nozzles...
Thank you for reading,
Caroline :-)
