This recipe was passed on to me by an Aunty. It was passed to her by her Grandma. And now I’m passing it on to you!
Great-grandma Beatrice was a farmers wife with four sons and one daughter. Practical recession-busting recipes like this were very much the go. But this recipe is by no means cheap on taste.
The pumpkin makes this cake lovely and moist, and the spices and mixed fruit remind me of Christmas.
I never met my Great-grandma as she passed away before I was born. I really like the idea of making a cake that she made. This to me is what cooking is all about.
To complete the little loop I’ll be taking some of this cake with me on a walk in the English countryside with the Aunt who gave me the recipe. Then it’s all tied up with a nice little bow.
Note: I used dried cranberries, dried cherries, almond, sultanas and the rind of a lemon and orange for my mixed fruit component. I’d usually use a bag of mixed fruit, but the bag of mixed fruit at the supermarket was 80% sultanas and 15% currents. How is that mixed? That’s just sultanas and currents. Pffft. And yea, I know almonds aren’t fruit. But I like them, so they went in.
I also didn’t have mixed spice and am trying hard to not accumulate things as I’m leaving London so soon, so used a combo of ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg. It was lovely. I hope my Great-grandma was OK with all this. I think she would be.
Mixed fruit and the rind of a lemon and orange for extra zest
Ingredients
250 grams pumpkin, cooked and mashed
¼ cup butter
2 eggs
¾ cup sugar
250 grams of mixed fruit
1 teaspoon mixed spice (lacking this – I used a combination of ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg)
1 ½ cups self-raising flour
¼ teaspoon baking powder dissolved in 1 tablespoon vinegar
Method
- Preheat oven to 200C and grease a 18cm round or square cake tin.
- Into the hot cooked pumpkin, add the butter and allow to cool.
- Add the rest of the ingredients and stir well.
- Pour in to your prepared cake tin and bake for 50-55 minutes. It’s done when a knife comes out clean and it’s nice a golden on top.
Healthy? Cut up into 16 peices to take to work with tea makes them 165 calories a slice. The whole cake is 2,650 depending on your fruit choices.
Gluten free? I think you could easily swap in a GF flour and it would bind well. But I haven’t tried it.
Storage: In an airtight container. It also freezes beautifully.
