Cathedral Cake by Flourish with Food

Fruit and nut cakes have rather a bad reputation in the US, sadly deservedly so, because most of the commercially prepared cakes currently available seem to be heavy, overly sweet, seasonal confections filled with artificially colored cherries, preservatives, and fake candied peel. It’s a shame really, because a well made fruit cake is a wonderful treat, and the cakes have a long history, dating back over 1000 years (see below).

Flourish with Food is attempting to change this situation with the introduction of our artisan ‘Cathedral Cake’ from our ‘Taste of Europe’ range. In contrast to most commercially prepared fruit cakes, our fruit and nut cake is not only absolutely delicious but is also truly healthy at the same time. Each cake is made using organic ingredients, and contains no white sugar or flour, no artificial ingredients and no chemical preservatives or additives. Instead, whole dried fruits (raisins, papaya, apricots, dates and pineapple) are first marinated in freshly squeezed orange juice before being combined with selected nuts, spices, rapadura (dehydrated cane juice), free-range eggs and stone-ground whole grain flour. The cakes are dairy and fat-free, and as they are vacuum sealed immediately after baking, they have a long shelf life and will stay fresh for many weeks if left unopened.

Why Cathedral Cake?

When I first started making these cakes, back in the 1980s, I admit that I was using artificially colored red, green and yellow cherries (I now know a lot better!) and when you cut the cakes, each slice looked like it was part of a stained glass window, with the light shining through the cherries. Everyone loved them but they were decidedly unhealthy! When I reformulated the recipe, I struggled to come up with another name for the cakes, eventually giving up and sticking to the original name as I loved it so much!

Cathedral Cakes make an ideal gift, and are available from selected retail outlets in the Reno / Tahoe area as well as here on our website. Each cake cuts into at least 12 generous, guilt-free pieces, and will keep well after opening if carefully wrapped and stored in its tin.

Try one today! Click on the ‘Add to Cart’ button above to order.

The History of Fruitcake

The history of fruit and nut cakes goes back well over a thousand years when unleavened cakes made with dried fruits, nuts and honey were often enjoyed by the wealthy in the fertile Mediterranean basin, and eaten on celebratory occasions. However the fruitcakes that we are more familiar with today date from Medieval Europe, when dried fruits such as raisins, figs, dates, currants and apricots and spices such as cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg began to arrive on the trade routes from the East. Cooks began incorporating these new ingredients into basic bread dough that was either made at home or purchased from the local baker and regional variations of these early fruitcakes such as the Welsh Bara Brith began to appear (bara meaning bread and brith meaning spotted or freckled i.e. containing dried fruit). An alternative version of the history of fruitcake would have us believe that fruitcake is an extension of the plum (plumb) or figgy puddings which cooks started to make around this time, plumb or figgy being an old word for raisin, but the fact that these puddings were and still are always boiled or steamed whereas cakes are always baked means this is probably not the case.

For several hundred years fruitcake continued to be more like an enriched bread than a cake, and many different varieties were made throughout Europe.  The British favored lighter loaves and small individual buns, and added eggs, spices, sugar, butter, lard and rather strangely rosewater to their dough, whereas in central Europe the cakes were more likely to be less sweet but spicier, darker and heavier with the addition of rye or barley flour.

Larger households made huge quantities at a time as evidenced by the following recipe for a Spice Cake, taken from the Countess of Kent’s book, A True Gentlewoman’s Delight, written in 1653: “Take one bushel (56lbs) of Flower, six pound of Butter, eight pound of Currans, two pints of Cream, a pottle (half a gallon) of Milk, half a pint of good Sack (sherry), two pound of Sugar, two ounces of Mace, one ounce of Nutmegs, one ounce of Ginger, twelve yolks, two whites, take the Milk and Cream, and stir it all the time that it boils, put your hot seething milk to it and melt all your Butter in it, and when it is blood warm, temper the Cake, put not your Currans in till you have made the paste, you must have some Ale-yeast, and forget not salt.”

Fruitcakes were eaten throughout the year, often with cheese as an accompaniment. The richer, fruitier ones such as Simnel Cake, Cumbrian Christmas Bread or Scotch Bun were reserved for the special church festivals of Easter and Christmas whereas cakes such as Bride Cake, the earliest version of our modern European Wedding Cake, celebrated other occasions.

According to Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food, making a rich fruit cake in the 18th century was a major undertaking. “The ingredients had to be carefully prepared. Fruit was washed, dried, and stoned (taking the pits out) if necessary; sugar, cut from loaves, had to be pounded and sieved; butter washed in water and rinsed in rosewater. Eggs were beaten for a long time, half an hour being commonly directed. Yeast, or barm from fermenting beer, had to be coaxed to life. Finally, the cook had to cope with the temperamental wood-fired baking ovens of that time. No wonder these cakes acquired such mystique”. [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 321-322)

When cooks began using chemical raising agents to replace the traditional yeast that they had been using, fruitcakes began to increasingly resemble those that we see today; round, square or loaf shaped, and these were the cakes that were carried to the colonies with the first immigrants, who wanted to bring some of the traditions of their homelands with them. However even though today’s fruitcakes may be visually similar to their traditional counterparts, most modern bakers have completely sacrificed taste for convenience and use cheap candied citron, poor quality dried fruit, lots of white sugar, margarine and powdered eggs to keep their costs down. Even so called ‘gourmet’ cakes are full of preservatives, and rarely made with healthy or organic ingredients. It’s not surprising therefore that so many of us shun fruitcake and regard it with distaste!