A Boiled Fruit Cake - An Heirloom Recipe Series

For Christmas and The Rest of The Year Too - Extra Food Chat with Kath

Welcome to another Heirloom Recipe on Extra Food Chat with Kath!

Here is a festive recipe from Grandma’s collection for you. This one could come in handy over the upcoming festive season, but is equally good any time of year.

Take a listen to the voice note from me below for a bit more chatter and an introduction to this recipe.

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I don’t ever remember seeing my Grandma make fruit cake, but there was always one ready to be eaten in her kitchen. She didn’t just make one at Christmas, she made them all year round as it was something my Grandpa liked to eat for his morning tea (I assume she liked the cake too?!).

I recall seeing small slices of this dark looking cake, the odd red glacé cherry catching my attention, but knowing I would never try it. Dried fruit? No thank you. And the taste of strong alcohol, definitely no thank you!

My disdain for fruit cake lasted many (many!) years. It’s only this year that I’ve thought, ‘I guess it’s not so bad.’ Not quite the ringing endorsement one would hope for a cake, but for me that’s high praise for fruit cake!

I’m not 100% sure this recipe is the one my Grandma used all her life, there are a couple of different fruit cake recipes floating around her recipe collection. Despite that, this recipe worked the first time I tried it, so I can only assume that it was a tried and tested recipe to some extent.

The first time I made this recipe I used the standard mixed fruit option you can easily get at the supermarket. It was okay (the mixed peel was not ok, I really hate that stuff!), though I felt the ‘mixed’ fruit could do with more variety next I made it.

For this version, I have used a wider selection of dried and glacé fruits, making my own mixed fruit mixture of sorts. I used dried quince, apricot, peach, fig and pear (all from Singing Magpie Produce’s Riverland Melange mix), a few extra dried figs that had been soaking in sticky quince syrup (another Singing Magpie Produce gem known as ‘sticky quince figs’), a few sultanas and currants, glacé cherries and glacé ginger. No mixed peel! Though if you like it please add it in if you make this cake.

As you can see in the image of my Grandma’s handwritten recipe for this Boiled Fruit Cake, there are a few things missing from the recipe! Firstly, there was no tin size specified for the cake. I tried it in a 23cm square tin, which worked well and at 150 degrees Celsius the cake cooked for exactly the three quarters of an hour my Grandma specified. The next time I made it in a deep 20cm round tin and the cake only needed an extra five minutes in the oven.

Next, in the method come ingredient list for the recipe, my Grandma has written ‘tea spice’. At first I was wondering what on earth tea spice was, then my Mum suggested maybe it meant a teaspoon of spice. That made much more sense, despite the fact the spice needed wasn’t specified. I went with mixed spice since its decidedly festive, and also contains a mixture of a few spices so I felt I was covering all bases.

Finally, the next main missing piece of information was how much brandy to pour over the hot cake. Grandma just says ‘pour brandy over hot cake’, no indication of how much to use at all! I can’t imagine Grandma specifically measuring this every time, I have a feeling she would have just poured over whatever she felt was enough.

I went with 3 tbsp, as it felt neither very stingy nor over the top (though this may be informed by my aforementioned disdain for strong tasting alcohol which has persisted into my adulthood! If you actually like brandy I guess you can use a little more!). And since the there is no mention of flaming the alcohol, I also didn’t think adding heaps would be a great idea.