Chocolate Fruit Cake

Yet another little gem from the 1917 Modern Cookery book. As I read the method it strikes me that the raisins in those days must have been very large, as almost every recipe tells you to stone and chop/quarter them. I left mine in whol., but wish I had chopped them now. This is a fairly small cake.

I butter and line a 6” spring form cake tin. Pre heat your fan oven to 160C

6 oz plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

4 oz butter, softened

4 oz sugar [I used caster]

2 oz sultanas

2 oz raisins

2 large eggs

2 tablespoons milk, pref buttermilk

1 oz good cocoa - Green and Black, of course!

After stoning your raisins!!! Plus taking the stalks off your sultanas!! 

Mix the flour, cocoa and baking powder together and put them through a fine sieve. [Those were the days] Beat the fat and sugar together to a soft cream, drop in the yolk and white of one egg and beat for four minutes [! is that by hand, before mixers? - I will do it for a couple of mins]. Add the other egg and beat for another four minutes!! I did that for another one minute.

Yeah. Continue beating while you add the flour, fruit and milk. When it is an evenly mixed batter, turn into a well greased tin and bake in a moderate oven for one hour. After 30 mins I turned the oven down to 150C

Don’t you just love how they wrote in those days? But the extra beating did make the batter very creamy.

But it is a lovely cake. I did not doubt it would be, for a moment.