More Cakes of Joy

Perhaps you think I don't like fruit cake. You are wrong. Another cake I loved when I was young was Boiled Fruit Cake.

This was a cake my grandma used to make, and she gave the recipe to my mother. The recipe was handwritten on yellow paper. And that was why they both made Boiled Fruit Cake in the same way.

It was a funny way to make a cake. My grandma had copied the recipe from a magazine. The thing about my mother and my grandma was that neither of them liked cooking very much, and this recipe was easy, for a fruitcake.

What you had to do was melt an entire brick of butter in a pan, bring it to the boil, then tip a whole packet of sultanas into it, and a massive load of sugar. You boiled it for a bit. Then you let it cool.

This took ages. Sometimes we took the pan of hot sultanas out into the garden. As it cooled it got a greasy film on top. The sultanas puffed up tight inside their skins and flies buzzed round the rim of the pan.

When it was cool you added several cups of flour and two beaten eggs. To me this always seemed the way to wreck it. It never tasted nicer than it did before the flour was added. Plump warm sultanas in a melted toffee liquid.

But you couldn't pretend it was a cake. So the flour and eggs were added and the cake put in the oven. It took an hour to cook, because it was a rich and heavy cake.

In those days ovens were difficult to work, especially electric ones. At least my mother thought ours was. After twenty minutes on HIGH you had to switch to TOP OFF BOTTOM LOW. I don't know whether you had to say it aloud when you did it, but she always did and that's why I remember. Perhaps she thought it was funny. When you think about it, it is.

It didn't seem to help much though. Our boiled fruit cake was always burnt a little on the bottom. You knew you had a good one when the black layer was thin.