Looking for a fruit cake recipe using dates and raisins?

Question

Please provide me with pan size and oven temp and time required to bake. Thanks in advance. I will make it today and give you 10 points if it turns out well. Have already lined up the usual cake ingredients on my kitchen counter.

Answer 1

G'day Hysteria,

Thank you for your question.

This is a recipe that I got from rec.food.cooking and is an old family recipe from South Carolina although it requires aging. It was originally posted by Rodger Whitlock of British Columbia.

"Be sure to read the notes at the end. I've marked the recipe with
asterisks * to mark them.

1 1/2 cups sugar
3 cups cake flour
2 tsp baking powder (single acting)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 to 3/4 tsp cloves
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp ginger
see note salt*

1 lb dark raisins
1 lb currants
1 lb dates
3 slices candied pineapple* (cut into pieces)
1/2 lb whole candied citron peel* (cut into manageable lumps
1 cup nut meats (pecans are traditional; walnuts are okay)

"a nickel's worth" of whole candied cherries (red and green)*

5 eggs
1 cup butter or margarine*
1 cup mixed fruit juices (orange* + pineapple is good)

Preheat oven to 250F. Use an accurate oven thermometer.

Pan: a large tube pan with removable bottom/centre piece (angel food cake pan), sides and bottom lined with greased brown paper cut to fit. Grocery bag paper is fine if no printing on it.

Sift flour, sugar, baking powder, and spices together several times to mix well.

Mix raisins, currants, dates, candied citron, candied pineapple, and nut meats together. (Candied cherries come later.) Add enough of the mixed dry ingredients to flour well, then chop in food processor using steel blade. Pulse the machine, rather than run continuously. Put the fruit through in several small lots rather than all at once. Chop only coarsely, say until the dates and citron peel are in raisin-sized bits. Add extra dry ingredients from time to time if necessary to keep everything from sticking together. You can also chop each kind of fruit separately if you prefer.

Mix chopped fruit with remaining dry ingredients in a large bowl so that fruit is well and evenly floured and there are no stuck together clumps of anything.

Melt butter (or margarine). Beat eggs slightly, add melted butter and fruit juices, and continue beating until thoroughly combined. Add to the fruit and dry ingredients, then mix well. This is easiest to do with your hands.

Turn the mass of batter and fruit into the pan and pack down to a
uniform depth with back of a large spoon to eliminate air pockets. One by one, push the candied cherries down into the mix with your finger, and then repack with back of spoon to give an even top surface to the mass.

Cover pan with a single sheet of aluminum foil, crimp edges and poke into centre tube of pan, creating hole so heated air can circulate up through centre of pan.

Bake at 250F for 8 hours (eight hours!). Remove foil cover about
one-half hour before end to give a slight crust.

Remove from oven and cool in pan overnight on a rack. Do not turn upside down to cool!

Take cooled cake out of pan by lifting out the removable bottom piece, separate cake from bottom piece, and remove lining paper from the cake. Poke holes in the cake with a skewer and sprinkle with 1 tbsp liquor (brandy, bourbon, or rye)

Wrap in cheesecloth, and place in airtight container with a quartered apple. Store in a cool location to age. Replace apple as necessary. Add a little more liquor* if the cake seems too dry in spite of the apple.

Age 6 weeks to 3 months before serving.

Notes:

1. If you intend to keep this cake a long time (say several months)
use margarine rather than butter; butterfat goes rancid after a while.

2. The best candied pineapple is homemade. The commercial stuff tends to be rather flavorless. See the Time-Life "Good Cook" book on candy making for instructions on how to candy fruits by soaking them in sugar syrup, adding more sugar to the syrup and reboiling it every couple of days. You can get away with just making a simple syrup from the juice and simmering slices of canned pineapple in it for an hour or so, if you don't want to spend a week candying the pineapple.

3. Pre-chopped citron peel is allowable, but it too is rather
flavorless compared with the whole citron peel in lumps, and I suspect some of it isn't really citron. It can be tricky to find real citron peel these days.

4. The original recipe calls for "a nickel's worth of candied
cherries." Make of this what you will. I was told as a child that you
put the cherries in last so they won't all settle to the bottom.

5. Beware saturating the cake with too much liquor; this can cause the development of a bitter taste and make the bottom of the cake soggy instead of just moist. It's really the quartered apple that makes the cake nice and moist after it's aged.

6. The salt in salted butter is more than enough. If you use unsalted butter, add a small amount of salt to the dry ingredients. As a precaution, be sure to taste the batter before putting the cake in the oven.

7. Use *fresh* orange juice if possible. The juice from canned
pineapple is good mixed with it.

8. If you don't have a food processor, just cut the raisins in half or
quarters with scissors and chop up the dates, nuts, pineapple, and citron peel by hand.

9. Oven temperature must be accurate. I've experimented for years to get time and temperature exactly right, and have found most ovens are out by up to 25F. At this low temperature, this can make a considerable difference.

Alternatively, one can bake the cake without the foil cover. If so,
put a shallow pan on the rack below and keep it filled with boiling
water. This envelopes the cake in steam so it doesn't dry out.

10. A convenient size and shape of "airtight container" is a large
Rubbermaid salad container turned upside down, with the cake on a dinner plate resting in the lid.

I have attached sources for your reference including other recipes.

Regards

Answer 2

1

Answer 3

Celebration Cake
500g (1b) sultanas...... 5 Eggs
250g (8oz) raisins....... 1/2 cup rum,brandy
250g (8oz) dates.......... or sweet sherry
125g(4oz) currants........ 1 1/4 cup plain flour
125g (4oz) mix peel........1/3 cup self-raising flour
125g (4oz) glace cherries ..... 1 teaspoon of mix spice
60g (2oz) glace pineapple ..... 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
60 g (2oz)glace apricots ..........1/4 teaspoons nutmeg
250g (8oz) butter ....................1/4 teaspoons salt
1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
2 tablespoons rum,brandy or sweet sherry extra

chop raisins, dates, peel,cherries,pineapple and apricots, combine in large basin with sultanas, currants and rum: mix well .
cover: stand overnight,
line a deep 20cm (8in) square or deep 23cm (9in.) round cake tin with three thickness of greaseproof paper, bring paper 8cm (3 in.) above edges of tin,
beat butter until soft: add sugar; beat only until combined. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add cream mixture to fruit mixture; mix well stir in sifted dry ingredients mix thoroughly ; spread evenly into prepared tin; bake in slow oven 3 to 31/2 hours,
when cooked remove from oven brush evenly with extra rum, remove from tin; re-wrap in aluminium foil to keep airtight until required

Answer 4

http://www.cooks.com/rec/search/0,1-0,date_dark_fruit_cake,FF.html