Happy New Year to you all!
In honour of the celebration of this fresh start and resolutions for the upcoming months, I am sharing this recipe for the perfect Caribbean Rum Spiced Cake, which will start all celebrations with a bang!
For the New Year's Cake, you'll need;
- Rum-soaked fruit (B.N: I had soaked mixed fruit kit of cherries, currants, prunes, citrus peel, raisins in an aged Barbados rum for almost 3 years however it is at least recommended to allow fruit to soak for 3 months prior to baking)
- 250g of unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 250g of soft dark brown sugar
- 100ml of freshly boiled water
- 200g of self-raising flour
- 50g of ground almonds
- 1 tsp of baking powder
- 1½ tsp of ground mixed spice
- zest of ½ a lemon
- 250g of caster sugar
- 4 medium-sized free-range eggs
- 1 tsp of vanilla extract
- 1 tsp of almond essence
For the decorative royal icing, you'll need:
- 500g of Royal Icing Set (B.N See images below to purchase)
- 2 tbsp of lemon juice
- 2-3 tbsp of warm water
- B.N: I decided to buy shop-brought marzipan, however in the future I will be sure to post a recipe on how to handmake different types of icing.
Instructions to make are as follows:
1) Heat the oven to 150℃/130℃ Fan/302°F/ Gas Mark 2. Grease and line a deep 23cm diameter loose-bottomed cake tin with baking paper.
2) Heat the brown sugar within a saucepan over a medium heat until it dissolves and turns a dark caramel colour (please see images below for guidance).
3) Stir in the boiled water into the heated sugar and stir until the consistency is smooth, syrupy caramel sauce, before setting aside.
4) Beat the butter and caster sugar together until light and fluffy before adding in the eggs, one at a time until well combined. Stir in the vanilla extract and almond essence (optional).
5) Fold in all the dry ingredients (see image below for reference) first until combined, before adding in the blended fruit and caramel sauce, folding slowly to prevent beating air out of the cake.
6) Pour cake batter into designated tin and bake for 3½-4 hours until a skewer pushed into the centre of the cake comes out clean.
B.N: if possible, invest in the detachable bottom cake tins, to ease removing the cake from the tin.
7) Once the cake is cooled, insert small holes into the cake and pour an extra drizzling of rum, and allow to soak for a further few hours.
To prepare icing:
- Since the icing was shop brought, I simply rolled it out, generously covered the cake with lemon curd, placed the marizpan layer on top.
- As for the royal icing, I added around 500g of icing sugar with 1 tbsp of lemon juice and about 2-3tbsp of warm water and stirred until smooth.
- It's best to use a pallet knife to apply the icing over the cake smoothly, however I will create a whole new blog post on icing techniques later.
As for what you've been waiting for... photos!
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