I don’t really like dried fruit. “Does she like any food?!”, I hear you exclaim. “She doesn’t like avocado, she doesn’t like dried fruit! What does she eat???”
Potatoes.
Anyway, as I don’t like dried fruit, I don’t like fruit cake. Because I don’t like it, I’ve never made it.
I can’t remember when I decided I didn’t like it. I don’t really remember eating it, but surely I must have done if I’ve come to that conclusion.
For some reason, other people do like fruit cake and so I feel like it’s something I should try to make at least once.
My mum makes a Christmas cake every year and it seems like it is a very long process to make and cook. By the time she’s finished decorating it, it always looks amazing (I have put a picture below this paragraph of last years cake to illustrate my point), but to be honest the whole thing seems like a faff to me.
Look at that cake though! Isn’t she clever 🙂
I decided to dip my toe into the fruit cake water, but I didn’t want to fully submerge myself straight away (what is this analogy) by making a proper Christmas-cake-esque fruit cake.
I started off slowly, a doggy paddle if you will, and made the 30-minute Fruit Cake from my Good Houskeeping book. I bought this book on a whim because it was £4 or something, and it’s actually a great book.
The cake smelled nice. It was easy to make, and was full of fruit. I mean look at all that dried fruit. Nice if you’re a fan of dried fruit, but as I think we established early on in this blog, I’m not keen.
I did leave it in the oven for a few more minutes than the recipe said because I wasn’t sure it was cooked in the middle, but apart from that nothing remarkable happened. Pretty straightforward.
My mum and dad liked it and if they like it then it must have been good; they are, obviously, completely impartial critics.
Feedback from Dad: “Yeah it’s lovely, it really is lovely. Very light.”
Feedback from Mum: “I like the crunchy almonds on the top. It’s light. I don’t quite know how to say this but it’s not like a fruit cake, it’s like a sponge cake with fruit in it, so it’s a light fruit cake.”
I tried it and can confirm I still don’t like fruit cake. I do agree with my mum though, it was light and it wasn’t dry.
Will I make it again? No, probably not.
Was it as bad as the avocado cake? No.
What an adventure!