Just looking through my mum’s scrapbook of recipes and another one using dried fruit, this time cherries as well as apricots and prunes. Apparently the boiled fruit method is easiest – I don’t think I’ve ever done that – and it makes a very moist cake which keeps for weeks and even months in an airtight tin. It may do in some people’s homes, not in ours! It’s also the sort of recipe where you can use different fruit and nuts as well.
Apricot, prune and cherry cake
- 4 oz each of stoned apricots, pitted prunes, glacé cherries – I think I would seek out actual dried cherries or use something other than glacé; chopped or halved
- 6 oz butter
- 6 oz muscovado sugar
- ½ pint unsweetened fruit juice such as orange
- 2 oz candied peel
- 8 oz plain flour
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (I’m very sensitive to bicarb, so I might miss it out or use self-raising flour)
- 2 large eggs, whisked
- put butter, sugar, juice into pan over heat and keep stirring until th sugar melts
- add the fruit and peel and bring to the boil simmer for 10-15 mins, leave to cool
- when cool stir fruit mixture into the flour (and bicarb if using)
- stir in beaten eggs, then pour into a 7″ greased tin, lined buttered and dusted with flour at the bottom
- bake for 1½h at 350º F, 180º C, gas mark 4, leave in teh tin for 10 mins to cool then turn out onto a cooling rack
