1849 Gold Rush Fruit Cake IV with 2 Sourdough Starters and Fig Yeast Water

Lucy feels back in her element when she starts getting close to anything remotely close to German baking and the next thing you know she has lost her mind and starts putting all kinds of stuff in whatever recipe she is concocting.  She really went wild with this one.

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Not only does it have a bunch of totally snockerd fruits that were snockering away in the fridge for over a year, which upset my wife the whole time, it has sprouted Kamut, sprouted spelt, whole rye and whole red and white wheat all in the triple levain with LaFama AP for 77% dough flour.  Instead of using water for the NMNF and wild and black Forbidden rice starter levain, she used well aged in the fridge, for months, fig yeast water.  Has she no shame?

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8 g each if NMNF and Black Rice starters were used with a whopping 23 % pre - fermented flour.  Fruitcake hardly has any flour in it to begin with so the percentages were deceiving in this case and it totaled 124 g with have the weight in fig YW.  Once it doubled on the heating pad we retarded it overnight. 

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The snockered fruit had 3 kinds of raisins, dried: figs, cranberries, cherries, dates and the other normal fruit cake stuff like red and green cherries, pineapple, orange, lemon, citron and whatever else I could find a year ago.  There was only 20 g of dough water to go with the 200 g of dough flour but the rest of the liquid came from the 3 eggs and the ton of butter that goes in last.  This one had walnuts and almonds for the nuts.  Lucy wanted pecans that usually go in….. but not this year.

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It usually has a bunch of chocolate chips too but I didn’t have any.   I did have some Andies mint choco chips I could have put in but decided at the last minute not to.  Now we will never know what a minty fruit cake would taste like – a shame really but there is always version 5 for next year. 

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There is a bunch of brown sugar in the mix, but there is no molasses in this one so it isn’t as dark as previous ones.  The last ingredient is the mix of 6 spices.  Cinnamon makes up half and then there are equal parts of allspice, cloves, ginger, mace and nutmeg.  All together it came to 1.5 teaspoons – not overpowering by any means.  If you like it spicy then you can add some more. 

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I put it on the heating pad, in the baking dish that had parchment on the bottom and the rest sprayed with pan release for 6 hours.  It didn’t do much but fruit cake isn’t known to be light and airy either.  The rest of the baking is 2.5 hours at 300 F.   You can find o;d versions by putting 1849 in the search box. Here is version 3 where you can see what the fruits looked like before a year of snockering.

1849 Gold Rush Sprouted 12 Grain Sourdough Fruit Cake III

By snockering the fruits, you get the flavor but the alcohol vaporizes out in the oven so that the little ones can eat it no worries.  That is why I usually make two, not this year,  one is for adults and soaked in brandy a few weeks so it can age properly.  

Levain

2% each Wild and Black Forbidden Rice starter and NMNF rye starter

23%  Whole rye, red and white wheat and sprouted spelt and Khorasan - 62g

23% Fig Yeast Water - 60 g

Dough

77% LaFama AP – 200 g

7.7% Water – 20 g

50% Butter – melted – 131 g

175% Snockered fruits – 458 g

50% Nuts - 131 g

48% Brown sugar – 118 g

1 ½ tsp of mixed spices, cinnamon, ginger, mace, nutmeg, allspice, cloves