Home › Cake Making and Baking › Steamed Fruit Cake
Steamed Fruit Cake
1 cup butter 1 cup sugar ½ cup molasses ½ cup strong coffee (or tea) 1 pound raisins 1 pound currants ½ pound walnuts ¼ pound citron 1 teaspoon each kind of spice 1 teaspoon soda ¼ 1/4 pound dates (optional) Five Roses flour to make rather stiff dough.
Steam 2 hours.
A terse Canadian milling-company formula for a dark, moist fruit cake cooked in a covered mould over water rather than in the oven. The steaming is the whole point: it keeps two pounds of dried fruit from scorching and gives a texture closer to a pudding than a baked cake.
- The hinge: a sealed mouldButter a lidded pudding mould or a deep tin covered tightly with buttered parchment and foil, and fill it no more than two-thirds. Water reaching halfway up the mould must stay at a bare simmer, and the pot must be topped up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- "Rather stiff dough"For this quantity of fruit expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of flour: the batter should mound on the spoon and hold its shape, not pour. The original leaves the amount to the cook's judgement, so add the last cup gradually.
- "Each kind of spice"The recipe names none. The shorthand is usually taken to mean the common baking spices of the day: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, and often ginger, a teaspoon of each. That is a heavily spiced cake by modern taste; half quantities are defensible.
- Soda, not baking powderThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the molasses and the coffee. Dissolve it in the coffee or sift it with the flour rather than adding it to the creamed butter, where it will sit in streaks.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks and cut into thin slivers. Mixed candied peel is the usual substitute; a quarter pound is about 3/4 cup chopped.
- Flour the fruitTwo pounds of raisins and currants plus nuts and peel may sink in the batter, so toss them with a few spoonfuls of the measured flour first.
- Time and donenessThe original gives two hours. A large single mould may want longer, and it is done when a skewer comes out clean and the surface is springy rather than wet.
- Yield and keepingThe ingredients come to well over five pounds, so this is a large cake. Steamed fruit cake keeps well wrapped for a week or two and slices far better on the second day than warm from the mould.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its Five Roses brand flour, and it collected contributions from customers, which explains the clipped, assume-the-reader-knows tone here. Steaming a rich fruit cake instead of baking it belongs to the older British pudding tradition that Canadian and American kitchens carried forward: a covered mould set over water cannot go above the boiling point, so a batter dense with dried fruit and molasses cooks through without a burnt crust, and it can be done on a stovetop or a summer range without heating an oven for hours. Cakes of this kind were generally made well ahead of Christmas and held.