Dry Fruit Cake

Let me start this year 2013 with a simple dry fruit cake to treat you all with a dry fruit cake. This is a cake with a sweet taste, with a firm and slightly chewy texture. The most important step in this cake is adding alcohol to the below mentioned dry fruits and keeping it for at least 2 days or a day so that it will allow for the alcohol to flavor the fruit. If you don’t want to use alcohol, you can ignore doing this process and just use the plain dry fruits. It is not necessary to use all the dry fruits mentioned below, if you don’t get all of them, raisins, cashews and dry plums will do better.

So before you begin, below are the initial steps to be done. Butter the pan it, or spray with a nonstick vegetable spray, The pan used here is a round shaped cake pan.

Grind the almonds in the blender and make a fine powder.

Grate few lemon skin and keep aside-Lemon Zest.

 
Marinating of Dry Fruits:
2-3 tablespoons Grand Marnier, rum, brandy.
3/4 cup (120 grams) dried apricots, dried pineapple and cashews.
1/2 cup (100 grams) candied red or green cherries.
1/3 cup (40 grams) of raisins.
Soak the dry fruits for atleast 2 days or a day.

Ingredients:

•    Unsalted butter-1/2 cup (113 grams)
•    Sugar-1/2 cup (100 grams)
•    Eggs-3
•    pure vanilla extract-1/2 tspn
•    1/4 tspn pure almond extract (optional)
•    All-purpose flour/Maida-1 1/2 cups (195 grams)
•    Almonds powdered-1/2 cup (50 grams)
•    Baking powder-1 tspn
•    Salt-1/4 tspn
•    Few Lemon Zest.
•    Milk- (whole or reduced fat)- 1/4 cup (60 ml).

Temperature and Time Duration:
Temp:350 degrees F (180 degrees C).
Time:60-70 Minutes.

Method:

•    In a mixing bowl, mix well with the whisker  the flour, ground almonds, baking powder, salt, and lemon zest and keep aside.

•    In the bowl of your electric mixer, or with a hand mixer, beat the butter as shown(Step 1)
•    Add sugar to this and beat again until it becomes fluffy(Step 2)
•    Add  one egg and beat and again add egg and repeat , beat well after each addition of eggs Scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. (Step 3)
•    Add vanilla and almond extracts and beat again,.
•     Add the mixed flour in two additions into this.Beat now with half of the flour until it becomes pluffy(Step 4 and Step 5)
•    Add milk into two additions, the first set of milk should be added at this stage (Step 6) and beat again.
•    Now add the dried fruits, and here you should add the remaining milk and the remaining flour mixture and beat until incorporated.(Step 7)
•    Pour the thick batter to the cake pan (Step 8) and now its ready to go into the Oven.

As I already mentioned, insert the toothpick into the center of the cake and see if it comes out clean, and then keep it in a wire rack or in a cool place. Once the cake is cool, scrap down all the sides and transfer it into plate.