Simple Fruit cake (whole wheat)

 

If there has been one thing that I have always loved in a bakery, it was the fruit cake. I would go to every bakery that I’ve ever seen, pointed to the fruit cake and asked the salesguy if it was egg-less. And they would shake their heads, thus shaking my dream of digging into the cake. THe dream of eating an egg-less fruit cake had just been unrealized. So when I figured out my cakes were turning out pretty neat, I knew I was going to bake this.

Some blog-hopping last night, in search of the recipe to the Christmas cake, I bumped into Raaga’s blog, and saw the recipe. Now, this one says 3 cups flour, which I knew was way too much for our family. So I reduced the quantities accordingly. Also, I had soaked raisins in rum 4-5 weeks ago, in the hope of getting to make the Christmas cake someday. But since this one is simple and very close to my dream cake, I thought I might as well use up few from that tin as well. And then, there is no way I would be baking a cake with Maida, when I know its me and my family eating it.(:) the logic is that we dont eat Maida at all at home, and if I am gifting the cake to others, I might as well make it tasty which is with Maida :)), so I substituted maida with whole wheat flour.

So here is the scaled down recipe -

Ingredients:

1 cup wheat flour
1 1/2 cup fruit mixture (raisins, sultanas, figs, tutty fruity)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda

2 tbsp yogurt
2 tbsp fresh cream
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp of cinnamon and cardamom powders each
2-3 drops of vanilla essence

Procedure:

Pre-heat the oven till 200C.

Beat the cream and yogurt together with the oil and sugar. Mix them well with the spice powders and vanilla essence.

Mix together the flour, baking soda and mixture.

Fold in the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, and mix. Add the fruit mixture to this, and mix well, so that the fruits are evenly distributed.

Pour into aluminium tins, and bake at 185C for 30 mins, or till the tester is clean.
This mixture fit into 5 tins of 4x3 inches, and I baked all of them at the same time.

Let it cool for a while.

As usual, this is a bad pic, but no, this does not relate to the way this cake tasted. The husband even thought it resembled Dil Pasand, that sweet we used to eat in road-side bakeries as we were growing up :)
I gave a tin each to two of my good friends, and they seemed to love it too. So I guess this recipe will stay with me! :)