Fruit cake unfortunately has a bad reputation.
Now good fruit cake is something worth experiencing.
Quality fruit cake is made using quality dried fruits, a simple butter pound cake batter, and once baked, thoroughly soaked in alcohol (for example, 1/2 to 1 cup of alcohol for an 8″ cake). It is then wrapped tightly, and allowed to age for a minimum of 2 weeks, thus allowing the alcohol to penetrate into the dried fruits and flavours to mellow and mature. In this particular case, whiskey was used, but rum and bourban are widely used. I heard a story once from a pastry chef, who said the best fruit cake he ever consumed was vacuum sealed and allowed to age for five years.
Fruit cake is best served with a layer of almond marzipan and, of course, a cup of tea.
For this particular cake, instead of marzipan, a layer of whipped ganache was used as a base layer. Rice cereal treats were used for select tiers.
The use of fruit cake in traditional cake decorating has the benefit of keeping at room temperature, and a firm stability that easily supports royal icing piping.
I love the oven… and the fruit cakes look good, even if t’s not a favorite of mine
It looks your cakes are not heavy,what’s the secret?
Hello Gustavo, thank you for your question. To reduce the weight of the cakes, I use whipped (well-aerated) buttercream or ganache as the main base under the fondant, and I roll fondant very thin. Having a good smooth coat of buttercream or ganache under fondant is helpful because the more smooth it is, the less fondant I can use. Fondant is usually the heaviest, and most expensive, part of a cake. I also usually choose foamcore cake boards over cardboard. However in the end, I would say that the cakes are indeed heavy. Hope that helps, R.