not the sort of fruitcake with the candied fruit and brandy, but cake with dried fruit in it.
This cake is remarkably easy to make.
It's also not really a fruitcake. This is a light sweet mechanism for delivering excellent dried fruit.
This cake is as good as the dried fruit you use.
You need a 7 inch cake tin that's deep, a mixing bowl, a wooden spoon, an oven with reliable heat, some way to measure weight and a pint measuring jug for measuring liquid. That's all the equipment you need.
Pre-heat oven to 150C, Gas 4, 300F.
Line the deep tin with greaseproof paper ("baking parchment").
Sift 8 ounces of flour into a bowl. You can use either patisserie (SR) flour or tour usage (plain) flour. This isn't a cake that rises all that much. Add a pinch of salt, a pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg. (For fanatical measurers, that would be a quarter of a teaspoon.) Sift in four ounces of sugar -- any sugar. White vanilla sugar is fine, soft brown sugar is fine, whatever you have. Add 14 ounces of excellent dried fruit, and stir with the wooden spoon until all the fruit is coated in flour and all the flour contains fruit.
In a pint jug, measure 4 fl ounces of liquid vegetable cooking oil, not olive oil, the blandest least tasty oil there is. Add four fl ounces of milk. The more butterfat in the milk the better. Add two eggs, and beat together with a fork.
Pour the wet glop into the dry, and stir with the wooden spoon until everything is mixed together and you can't see any flour any more. It won't be very liquid. Pour and spoon into tin. Smooth a little.
Sprinkle the top of the cake with demarara sugar. The amount you get in a paper packet with coffee is just right. You can use ordinary sugar, in which case you want about two teaspoons, sprinkled carefully over the top of the cake.
Bake on the lower shelf of the oven for an hour and a half. You can tell it's done when it starts to smell done. (Also known as the "That smells lovely. Oh my goodness, what time is it? What time did I put that cake in? I have no idea -- well, it smells done.") You can test with the clean knife method. If it's starting to smell done and isn't done, put a piece of greaseproof paper on the shelf above it in the oven, to prevent burning. This cake is supposed to be golden, not dark brown or, heaven forbid, black.
Leave to cool in the tin -- this is important, as it will crumble a lot if removed when hot. When cool, remove from tin, peel off greaseproof paper, and eat. It keeps fairly well in a tin or a tupperware -- not forever like a dark fruitcake, but for about a week.
