Fruity Teacake

I like fruit cake but I also find it quite heavy so I wanted a lighter, easier solution to this. I found this recipe on the BBC Good Food website for Fruit Teacake. This is cooked as a loaf rather than a round cake, meaning I could slice it more neatly into pieces. 

The first step was to soak the dried fruit in tea, the recipe states this should be for at least 4 hrs but preferably overnight. Unfortunately I didn't see this until we started to make it so we left it for 3-4 hours during the day. The fruit really plumped up and absorbed all the tea making it them lovely and moist. 

Once the fruit was ready I mixed together the spread and sugar until they were light and fluffy. I then added the egg and flour mixing until the mixture was light and fluffy. The mixture was quite dry at this point. I then added the fruit mixture and mixed it in, this made the cake a much lighter mixture. 

The mixture was then placed in a lined loaf tin, sprinkled with demerera sugar and baked in the oven, the recipe states for 1 hour, however, we left it in for a futher 30-45mins and still the knife was coming out dirty. I decided that we would just have to leave it and risk it. I left the cake to cool. 

Cake fresh out of the oven

To serve the cake I sliced the loaf up and then cut these in half, arranged them on a cake stand. 

Cake sliced and ready to eat.

Verdict: I really liked this cake, I found it very moist and fruity. It probably could have done with a little longer in the oven, so next time I'd leave it for even longer. I've decided to give the cake 9/10. I don't know whether baking it for a bit longer would dry out the cake but it would be worth trying it out. Gary says the cake is nice and fruity, he likes the sugar on the top with the extra crunch. He gives it 8/10 saying the fruit cake is pretty good.