I have a huge Carribean influence in my life and holiday black cake is a tradition for us. I am hoping others here bake it as well, because there is no exact way to make this cake! I have always learned more from others than from my own efforts in baking, this is one cake that gets better each year.
If you have never heard of it, I guess you can compare it with a baked plum pudding. The past few years I gave baked it in jars ...omg when you find a jar of black cake you forgot about...wow!
To start one for Christmas is still possible, but the best cakes take years to evolve due to the boozey fruit involved!
My battery is almost dead, but I look forward to seeing if anyone would like to talk about black cake?
Ithanks
I was in Barbados, watching a preacher's wife put it together in her kitchen. Very much like a traditional fruit cake in every respect except all the nuts (mostly peanuts) and mountains of colorful dried and candied fruit were run through a meat grinder (I had to help crank) turning everything into a dark sticky mass that was added to the batter. The result was the "Groom's cake" or "Black" fruit cake.
By soaking the fruit first there could be too much moisture during baking. How do you like your crumb?
I never did like grinding all the beautiful fruit into tiny bits. I had decided right then and there it was not my piece of cake. I'm a colored church window kind a girl and when I used to eat fruitcake, I like to hold it into the light, looking thru my fruitcake's jeweled color and ambered nuts getting lost in the sheer fancy of it.
Now a days, dried fruit is not so dry as it was sold years ago in waxed paper. Today there are moisture pouches (I remember it started with raisins) to keep the fruit supple. I would not soak them first but use a good basic fruit cake recipe (the batter tends to be a small amount) and add what you like to eat, and see in your cake when slicing and eating. After the slow bake, cool, wrap in a clean cloth and tight fitting container (tin) and pour on the rum or wine to wet the cloth. Cover and do it again in a few days. Keep doing this until the cake absorbs no more. I imagine in the Caribbean, many staples would not last long if not kept dry or drunken or put into glass. Cake in a glass in an interesting concept. Yes, I've seen it but makes even more sense in an area like the moisture salty warm windward islands. Could even bake in the glass and then add a hardy dose of 40% rum. No expiration date. I don't think I would use 80 proof, the maximum... without thinning. It is just too aggressive and may burn your vocal cords.
A good fruit cake can also be made without alcohol sealing it like a stollen with butter and sugar. Keep cool.
Reminds me of Traditional Rumtopf where fresh fruit in season is added to high % Rum and used in everything but fruit cake. When I went diving in the Philippines, took a jar of something similar using also some cherry rum and then vacuum packed the jar of fruit & rum so that I wouldn't have problems in the flight (non-pressurized). When opening, it smelled... well, like Christmas! Holiday gift for my diving instructor and he rightfully treated it as gold. Saw my first shark on Dec. 24th! I think the poor creature was more scared of us.
It is hard to find dried fruits these days that don't have added sugar types (as if dried fruit wasn't sweet enough.) Check your packages carefully. As you may have noticed, I've cut all sugar, fructose and sugar substitutes out of my intake. At least as best I can. But I'm sure that those listening in on this discussion are picking up all kinds of tricks and tips to make fruitcakes. Hey, did you know that at one time in history, fruit cakes were so decadent as to be declared illegal? The Stolen has a long history and had to return to a cake with fruit from a decadent fruit cake. The Brits naturally kept cranking out heavy fruit cakes. Thus a major difference was created.
I used to keep a jar of drunken raisins in my pantry for cakes, stollen, and strudel. Ready at whim. Yes, they're soaked because the time they take from mixing to baking is short and so is the time from baking to eating. Fruitcakes get a good soaking themselves and so I was not so fussy to soak the fruit before hand unless it was really dry.
The peanuts... good point. I've been thinking about that ever since I wrote it. They don't go well in a meat grinder alone unless mixed well with the other fruit. I can remember a few huge jars of peanut butter too! It was a big wedding and I don't think I'll ever see such a pile of fruit for cakes again. You can experiment easily on a small scale. I remember thinking it was too much raisins and peanuts for my taste but the finished product was quite good. I don't remember seeing any alcohol. Maybe a stronger version was being made somewhere else.
I do remember the cake having a crumb more like a dense brownie than a cake and solid color. The peanuts might have been hacked up in a blender too. I don't remember seeing them raw, chances are they were roasted, salt was washed off. I believe most of the fruit & nuts were combined and mixed together, covered and ground the next day. It was about the time I met my husband (and fell in love) and I certainly was distracted from concentrating on the baking part (or wasn't even present) I was also working and had other thoughts in my head no doubt. I was waiting for that first phone call. :) It was the middle of December, a week before Christmas.
Mini
I make dark fruit cake, which has raisins, (2 kinds) dates, candied cherries, and peel, currants, and candied pineapple, the cake part is flour, butter, eggs, with molasses, sugar (brown) and spices. I always put the fruit and nuts, (sliced almonds) in a large bowl, and soak with rum, wine, or whatever is handy! There isn't a whole lot of cake dough, its mostly fruit, with a bit of dough to bind it! I am going to try and make it with dried fruit this year rather than candied, especuially my white ones, these have more cake with golden raisins, dates, and mixed peel, and of course butter, eggs, sugar (white this time) and the spices.
The black cake sounds like a cross between dark fruit cake, and mincemeat (non meat type) and sort of like the depression cake which my mother used to bake, which is also known as wartime cake, eggless butterless, milkless cake, and other names. My mother added peanut butter in place of the lard or bacon grease she used in that, a nice natural peanut butter very oily, and its delicious.
I don't add rum to the cakes after baking, although I have wrapped a Dundee cake in a whiskey soaked muslin cloth, which added flavour but not a lot of alcohol, I will have to try the soaked fruit, and that is an interesting cake.
Can you give amounts of fruits, and the rest of the ingredients, in either cups, or weight (weight is always better) so I may try making it.
Oh yes the white cake has pecans in, and all the fruit nuts and the coconut for the white cake is also soaked in alcohol, I use white wine generally for the white cake, although a nice pink zinfandel is ok, but red wine or dark rum is generally used in the dark cake to not colour the cake part, I used red wine and had pink cake from bleed out of the wine when baking.