My sister Sylvia is also a great cook and baker. She frequently invents her own recipes, but in this case merely tweaked our grandmother's recipe, which in its original form made an enormous number of cakes.
Despite the changes made to the original recipe, the cakes turned out perfectly. As my sister the innovator said, "Grandma’s recipe said to use more or less of the dried fruits and nuts to suit your taste. That's my kind of recipe".
Ingredients:
- 3/4 cup butter (melted, then cooled somewhat))
- 4 medium eggs
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 cup molasses
- 1 cup orange juice
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 3 cups flour (1/2 cup of which is used to dust the fruit)
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp ginger
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspoon allspice
- 1/2 cup chopped candied ginger
- Butter for parchment paper
- Rum for soaking cheesecloth to wrap the cakes
1 1/2 cups each:
- Chopped pitted dates
- Raisins
- Currants
- Pecans (or walnuts)
1 cup each:
- Glacé cherries
- Mixed Peel
- Glacé pineapple
Methods:
Preheat your oven to 325 degrees F.
Mix the fruits and nuts together in a large bowl and toss with 1/2 cup flour. Sift together dry ingredients and spices.
Mix together the melted butter, sugar, molasses, eggs, vanilla, and orange juice. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients until well-combined, then stir in all of the fruit and nut mixture until everything is completely coated with batter. This is a fruit-heavy, dense batter.
Spoon the batter into three loaf pans that have been lined with buttered parchment paper. Place a shallow pan of water on the oven rack below the cakes.
Bake for 1 1/2 hours or until done. ( A toothpick inserted into the cake, comes out clean)
Cool. Wrap in rum-soaked cheesecloth and refrigerate.
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| The original recipe. It makes 6 cakes! |
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