Quick Boiled Fruit Cake - Mary Berry's Baking Bible

I had been craving a fruit cake for a while and this was the one I had my eye on in Mary's baking bible to bake.

This was the first fruit cake I have ever made, so I was looking forward to baking it although I was slightly nervous about how it would turn out!

Today my baking partner in crime was Boy No. 2 as Boy No. 1 was in nursery.

Instead of using sugar, Mary uses a 397g can of condensed milk which she instructs you to pour into a heavy based pan and add butter, raisins, sultanas, currants and glace cherries.  I liked the idea of doing this as I thought it would plump up the fruit and add even more sweetness.  I definitely have a sweet tooth!

However, I'm not a huge fan of glace cherries, and the recipe seems to call for quite a large quantity (175g).  As I seem to have a "thing" for pecan nuts at the moment, and happen to love nutty fruit cakes, I used 45g broken up pecan nuts and made up to the required 175g using the glace cherries.

I then let the butter melt into the condensed milk and fruit/nut mixture over a low heat, this seemed to take some time but all the butter had eventually disappeared.

Having left the fruit mixture to cool in the pan, I then added this to 225g self raising flour, 2 level teaspoons mixed spice and a teaspoon of ground cinnamon together with 2 eggs using my largest mixing bowl.  I mixed all of this together by hand then poured the gorgeous sweet smelling mixture (which also tasted very nice, I have to admit!) into a greased and lined 7in deep cake tin.  The cake was then baked for exactly one and three quarter hours (I did cover the cake with foil towards the end of cooking as it had browned very well!).

The smells coming from the oven were delicious and I was really looking forward to eating this cake after tea, so I was impatient for Boy No. 1 to finish school and for husband to come home from work!

I really enjoyed this cake and thought it was very tasty and yummy, although I did think that I couldn't really taste the spices in the cake.  The pecan nuts were really very good in this cake and gave an extra occasional crunch to the texture.  I would definitely bake this again!  The cake went down very well with the rest of the family and was particularly enjoyed by Boy No. 1!