Baking – Plum cake recipe

bakingcakedried-fruitflour

After all its a Christmas month so I wanted to something different so tried to do plum cake. But that ended up really mess. I got the recipe from blog did some variations to that but the cake ended up very bad I didn't get the Pic of it. Here is the recipe of what I did

750 Gram Mixed dry fruits (raisins, black currants, cranberries) mixed it in grape juice and left it overnight
1 1/2 cups All purpose flour
1 Zest of lemon
1 Zest of orange
1/4 tsp Clove powder
1/2 tsp Ginger powder
1/2 tsp Cinnamon powder
50 Gram Tuti fruity
250 Gram Butter – I used melted butter
200 Gram Brown sugar
1/2 tsp Baking powder
100 Gram Almond powder
1 tsp Vanilla essence

I did not use eggs in this recipe.

I mixed all the above said ingredients and the batter was thick for me so I added little hot water and then added some more melted butter to it. Then greased a pan and baked it using a pressure cooker.

After some time when I checked the cake it was very light brown in color and it was cooked all the sides so I took it out. After some time when I checked I could see the bottom of the cake was exactly the same color what i was expecting dark brown color. Also when I tried cutting the cake it was not in a proper form. It started breaking in to small pieces.

I am not sure of what is wrong in this. For brown color I can try caramelizing the white sugar. But I am not sure why It broke in to pieces. Can anyone please help me me to correct my mistake. I want to make this again next week. Thanks for your help.

Best Answer

Without butter creamed into the sugar (soft but not melted), there is almost nothing to give the cake structure. A pound cake would have 200g to 250g of flour and 4 eggs. Even supposing 4 eggs in the original recipe, 750g of fruit is a lot for this amount of batter to support.

Ground almond can be a reasonable substitute for flour in cakes (you don't want gluten development), but for a heavy fruit cake like this, I would suggest flour.