My colleague, who had cleared off to Jamaica to visit relatives, came back, and I was given as a present a mini fruitcake packed in a colourful cardboard box (the picture here is straight off the office scanner). At first I took it for the traditional Anglo-American Christmas fruitcake - a bone-dry assortment of azo-dyed pieces of fruit imprisoned under rock-hard white icing - but what came out of the packet was a muffin case holding a very dark brown goo much like mämmi, the rye-malt Easter pudding of Finland.
I tasted it warily - the cake was soaked right through with rum. There was so much rum that I dozed through the afternoon seminar and afterwards made a thorough mess of my Excel spreadsheet. I am blogging now in order to sober up into a fit state to work. My colleague, meanwhile, suffered an acute computer meltdown and did not stay to witness my disgrace.
The boozy cake is by a clear margin the best Christmas cake I have ever tasted - at least for anyone who likes raw gingerbread dough better than baked. A little searching on the net revealed that in Jamaica it is eaten at Christmas and also as a wedding cake, and apparently at every other decisive turn of life as well. It also turned out that the cake descends from the Christmas pudding of the British, which the colonial masters once brought with them to the Caribbean. Although the cake consists almost entirely of fruit and alcohol, it has none of those nasty bits of the candied-peel or maraschino-cherry kind.
The recipe looks exciting in other ways too. The fruit is pulverised and left to swim in rum for three weeks or three months, and the black colour comes from brown sugar that is melted and cooked until very dark. The finished cake gets still more rum poured over it and rests in its tin for 2-7 days. I usually test recipes before I hand them out, but all this shows why I am not doing so this time. What follows is a translation into European measures and into the ingredients of the cake I ate.
What lies ahead, then, is a job that demands a good deal of perseverance and a don't worry - be happy attitude. This post is a yellow sticky note to myself, so that next November - or perhaps in September - or perhaps tomorrow - I remember to take the necessary steps.
My colleague's aunt in Jamaica is apparently setting up a business that will fly these fruitcakes, vacuum-packed, around the world. That is, just as soon as she has first managed to build a road from her house through the mountains and the rainforest to civilisation. Since the aunt in question is famous for all manner of other heavenly delicacies as well, I shall try to tag along on the next family visit. In the meantime the cake can be ordered from a Caribbean online shop.
Recipe card
Jamaican Black Fruit Cake
- Fruit in rum 3 weeks - 3 months
- Tin 25 cm springform
- Oven 150 °C
- Baking 2-2.5 hours
- Resting in the tin 2-7 days
You will need
| 450 g | raisins |
| 225 g | currants |
| 100 g | prunes |
| 250 ml | dark rum |
| 800 ml | soft brown sugar |
| 225 g | butter |
| 6 | eggs |
| 225 g | plain flour |
| 1/2 tsp | baking powder |
| 1/4 tsp | nutmeg |
| 1/4 tsp | cinnamon |
| 1/4 tsp | cloves |
| 1/4 tsp | allspice |
| 100 g | dried cherries, if you like |
| 100 g | chopped nuts, if you like |
Method
- Pulverise the dried fruit in a blender or food processor and put it in a lidded preserving jar to steep in 150 ml of the rum for three weeks - three months. Shake every couple of days.
- Melt 500 ml of the brown sugar in a heavy-based saucepan and cook it until very dark brown. Leave to cool.
- Beat together the butter and the rest (300 ml) of the sugar.
- Add the eggs one at a time, then the rum-soaked fruit with its liquid, and then the cooled dark sugar.
- Add the dry ingredients (and the nuts).
- Pour the batter into a 25-centimetre springform tin lined with baking paper (or into a muffin tray lined with paper cases).
- Bake at 150 degrees for 2-2.5 hours. Take out to cool.
- Splash the rest of the rum over the cake in a few goes while it cools.
- Leave the cake in its tin for 2-7 days before turning it out to serve.
As a bonus gift, here is the world's best short story on the subject of fruitcake, Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory. The title is borrowed from it. I know, I know - but we still have a Christmas tree in the corner of the living room.
