10 Tips For Making A Fruitcake That's Moist And Delicious

It just wouldn't be Christmas without fruitcake, and while in recent years, other, "fancier" desserts have commanded the attention on our Christmas dinner table, the tradition of the cake, packed with dried fruit and soaked in liquor almost always makes an appearance. There's a reason why fruitcake persists and comes around every year as it's a cake recipe with a history tracing back to Roman times. The recorded ancestor of the modern fruitcake can be identified as the Roman Satura to provide energy for their armies. What they developed was a type of sweet bread with pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, raisins, barley mash, and honeyed wine. It's not that dissimilar to the modern fruitcake then. 

Importantly, the modern fruitcake developed as a way to use up preserved and dried fruit, the addition of liquor ensures the cake has a long shelf life and can be eaten months after baking. In fact, in 2017 a virtually intact century-old fruitcake was discovered in Antarctica and believed to have been brought by the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott on his doomed expedition to the South Pole. Of course, getting it right is not so easy and a dry, brick-like fruitcake, is a chore to eat. There are many tips and tricks to make sure your fruitcake is moist and delicious and keep those qualities for as long as the cake sits in the tin. 

Which liquor is best to soak the fruit in? The answer depends on your personal taste. Traditionally, strong, high-alcohol spirits are preferred and especially aged liquor like rum, brandy, and whiskey. The alcohol content is there to preserve the cake and as the cake ages, it absorbs flavors and taste notes for the liquor, from sweet and bitter to smoky and plummy.

There is no reason to stick with the traditional brown liquors though and if you prefer livelier or citrus flavors, you can use an orange liquor like Cointreau. The addition of limoncello can really lift the overall flavor of the cake and act as a nice counterpoint to the heavier, cloying elements of the cake.

Cherry brandy and amaretto are also good alternatives to use as a soaking liquor. Cherry brandy will make the cake rich and tart and impart a beautiful aroma that will fill the nose when you cut into your baked fruitcake. Amaretto, an Italian liquor flavored with apricot kernels and herbs and spices is an oft-used flavoring in Italian desserts. It is rich and unctuous, with a nutty flavor note that beautifully compliments the fruit and nuts in your cake. Sherry is more than a cooking wine and would be perfect to use, as it adds a fruity richness with complexity of flavor to your fruitcake. 

With a recent rise in people choosing to banish alcohol from their lives, the demand for alcohol-free fruitcake is on the rise. While the alcohol in certain liquors definitely has the advantage of prolonging the shelf-life of the fruitcake, you can use virtually any non-alcoholic beverage that fits your fancy. Some good alternatives include fruit juice –- apple juice, orange juice and prune juice. The fruit juice will add more rich, fruity flavor to the cake and keep the crumb moist during baking. Your cake may not be as indestructible as the alcoholic version, but it will be suitable for the abstinent, those with religious preferences and of course, children.

There are many more alternative beverages available for those choosing not to imbibe alcohol and as the trend for no and low-alcohol beverages rises, so does the range of alternatives that are available for us to use. Kombucha is more available than ever and the flavor profile makes it a really good option for soaking the fruit in your fruitcake. The fermented nature of kombucha will provide probiotic benefits from using it but kombucha also adds a welcome acidity to help cut through the sugar and the butter in the cake.

Grape juice is another non-alcoholic soaking beverage that works well. Try using a combination of half red grape juice and half white grape juice to prevent overpowering the mixture with too much tartness. Any alcohol-free beverage can be enlivened with a rum essence or whiskey flavoring. 

Making the fruitcake weeks in advance has many benefits. First, by combining the ingredients together in advance, it allows them to settle in and get to know each other. Marinading all the ingredients in their communal juices allows for flavors to ripen and the overall flavor and moistness of the cake to increase. Once the cake is baked, removed from the oven and allowed to cool, moisture can be added by "feeding the cake" once a week, pouring liquor into holes in the bottom of the cake.

"Feeding" the cake is done by turning the cake upside down, once it has cooled, rested and been allowed to form up a bit. Poke holes in the bottom of the cake with a skewer or similar implement and spoon in your chosen liquor slowly, until it has been absorbed into the body of the cake. Traditionally this is done once a week throughout the run-up to Christmas and the result is a beautifully rich and moist fruitcake that you will want to keep for yourself to dip into over the hard winter months of the following year.

"Seasoning," also known as "aging" or "ripening" allows the flavors to mature over the course of a few weeks improving the flavor and texture of the cake. The good thing about allowing your cake to season, is, well, you don't really have to do anything, just let it sit and ripen over time.

Either soaking your fruit in tea or adding a cup of tea to the cake mix adds bitter tea notes to counteract the sweetness of the fruit. Black tea is a natural bedfellow of dried fruit and fruitcake, and it adds a dark bitterness and aromatic botanical note to the finished article.

There are many types of tea in which you can choose to soak your raisins and apricots, etc in from traditional English breakfast tea to teas with a more distinct flavor profile like lapsang souchong, earl grey., Darjeeling , Assam black, Keemun, and Oolong are just some of them. There are also many green teas and infusions that can be used.

Cakes and sweet breads made with tea are a common traditional treat. You have the freedom to sweeten or to flavor your tea while brewing it before you soak your fruit so there are an endless number of options to add the flavor you prefer. Adding citrus or forest fruits to the tea on the boil brings in fruitiness and acidity. Honey or sugar obviously increases the sweetness while herbs and spices like cloves, cinnamon, and even rosemary can add hints of the unexpected. If you feel like experimenting you can make your own tea or infusion from flowers and plants that you find in your garden like lavender, chamomile, hibiscus, lemon balm, chrysanthemum, mint, and echinacea.

Now that anyone with even a passing interest in baking probably has their own sourdough starter bubbling away in their cupboard, it's worth considering adding it to your fruitcake mix. Adding a good scoop of sourdough starter to your cake mix to raise it not only improves the texture when risen but adds delicious, salty complexity to the overall flavor.

While most traditional fruitcake and Christmas cake recipes call for the use of baking powder rather than yeast, adding sourdough can increase the sponginess of your cake and make it lighter. Generally, fruitcake is rich and dense, and heavy, that's what we expect when we make a fruitcake, but as more and more people are using their sourdough in desserts, sweets and cakes, the earthy, salty qualities of the natural homemade cultured yeast actually make for a light, golden crumb that, while may not keep as long, will please even the most ardent doubters of the fruitcake. With a leavened fruitcake, the possibilities for serving it with richer toppings like Chantilly cream, brandy butter, or even an artisan vanilla ice cream increase.

Sourdough will make your fruitcake airier and spongier, more like a panettone than the slab-like fruitcake we're used to. Using a white starter or discard means the cake has that tangy sourdough flavor and because it rises naturally, the cake will be easier to digest. That can only be a good thing at Christmas.

Stout cake or porter cake as it is sometimes known, is a common recipe that can be found in Ireland, the U.K. and the Caribbean, basically anywhere that stout and Guinness is popular. Stout is thick and creamy with good, malted barley and hops flavor, so it adds a lovely rich, slightly bitter, and caramel note to your fruitcake. You can simply pour a bottle or can of a stout like Guinness, into your cake mix to add moisture and leave it to marinade with all the lovely fruit flavors before baking.

Some stouts have a heavy chocolate flavor making them perfect for Christmas cake, while others have a drier, more bitter flavor profile, which can act as a nice balance to the sugar-rich ingredients in the cake. Not all the alcohol will bake out of your cake, but stout is relatively low in alcohol, especially the store-bought stouts rather than the artisan or craft stouts.

Cooking with stout is something of a "dark art," and while it's not for everyone, those who love it, really love it. If you want to really increase the intensity of the treacle-like, chocolate flavor of the stout, try reducing two or three pints in a pot beforehand so you get a concentrated, sweet and dark syrup which you can then add to the mix.

While your cake is resting or "seasoning", baste the cake by brushing it with liquor like brandy, or with a non-alcoholic juice, like apple juice, once a week. You can do this more often if you want the cake really moist and this technique, together with "feeding" the cake can even save a disastrous dry fruitcake from the landfill.

If the outside layer of the cake is hard or doesn't seem to be absorbing the liquid, you can cut diagonal scores into the surface of the cake. Use a basting brush to liberally baste the cake with liquor or juice and take your time, to allow the cake to absorb it little by little.

Another well-known basting technique is to use a marmalade or jam. Generally, a rich, natural orange marmalade is preferred but it can cause problems as you have to be careful how you wrap the sticky cake afterward so that the paper doesn't cling to the surface of the cake and become inseparable. To help avoid this, dissolve the marmalade in half a cup of hot water first before using your basting brush to apply it. Maple syrup can also be used in the same way. It's a good idea to baste all sides of the cake, including the bottom if you can, to prevent all the moisture from remaining at the top of the cake.

In general, preheat the oven to 280 F with the fan function before putting the cake in the oven. Don't be tempted to turn the heat up. Keep the oven door closed and keep a careful eye on the cake's progress. The enemy of all cakes is distraction, so keep your cake front-of-mind and check it often. Using the fan function ensures the heat is evenly distributed around the oven so the cake will bake evenly.

Preheating the oven means there is a constant, even temperature in the oven and your cake will be cooked evenly throughout. If you put a cake into a cool or insufficiently heated oven, you risk cooking the top of the cake much faster and interfering with the rising process of the cake during baking. Ideally, you would use an oven thermometer to let you monitor the exact temperature, but most modern ovens have reliable temperature gauges built in. 

The familiar sight of an overdone fruitcake with that dark, hard exterior on the top is avoidable if you cover your fruitcake with a sheet of aluminum wrap. This will make sure the top of your cake doesn't' burn, but it will also keep moisture in, for more moisture within the fruitcake. The cake will take longer to bake, but the result will be far better and there is less risk of a dry fruitcake disaster. 

Covering your cake also encourages the cake to rise evenly. Cakes can often rise in the center creating a dome-like shape in the finished article. By covering the cake in the oven, you should avoid ugly dome cake layers and achieve a nice even, level rise, which is better if you are planning to ice or decorate it afterward. If you don't have aluminum foil, you can use a piece of parchment paper, but keep a close eye on it as it can dry and char easily if left too long.

This is a technique often used to refresh stale Christmas pudding but can work just as well for dry fruitcake. Gently fry a slice of the cake in butter, you can add a splash of liquor or cream and you have a delicious fruitcake dessert that is moist, flavorful, and a little bit naughty. If you cover the frying pan with a lid for a few minutes while frying you'll trap the moisture in and your cake will absorb it. 

Everything tastes better when fried in butter, that's an undeniable fact, so of course your fruitcake will benefit from the same treatment. It is a great way to improve the texture and flavor of a stale fruitcake that has been hanging around on the days after Christmas and a good way to avoid waste. Forget about your New Year's diet and instead, indulge yourself with a piece of fried fruitcake, you won't regret it. Well, you might, but it's worth it.