Healthy fruitcake

So one of my favourite new baking-recipe sources is Yvette van Boven. If you aren't Dutch you've probably never heard of her, but she is a great and funny and down-to-earth baker/cook. I bought her baking cookbook Home Baked with the book coupons I got for my birthday.

Yvette van Boven combines classic Dutch recipes with Irish inspiration, as she grew up in Ireland. Since my baking style is also a mix of Dutch and English, influenced by years of watching The Great British Bake-Off, this suits me perfectly. Today, I didn't really know what I wanted to bake, so I let my boyfriend pick out something easy that didn't involve pie-crusts (my arch nemesis). His suggestion: almond-fruitcake.

Now Yvette also likes to include recipes that are gluten or 'fast sugar' free, and this is one of those recipes. As such, it includes almond flour, which turns out to be one of the most expensive things ever. You could probably get away with using wheat (or any other kind of) flour, but we shall see what the almonds add to the taste when the cake gets out of the oven.

Ingredients:

250 g almond flour (or wheat, probably)

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 apple or pear, cored and diced

100 g dried apricots (I cut these into smaller pieces too)

100 g dried prunes (cut, althoug the recipe doesn't tell you to)

50 g walnuts

4 eggs

1 teaspoon of honey

about 75 ml water

Grease a loaf tin with olive oil (if you want to be all vegan about it) or butter, line with baking parchment. Preheat your oven to 170 C (fun fact: Yvette also wants you to get an oven thermometer, so I now know exactly how hot my oven is. Turns out it is a lot cooler than it thinks it is).

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Mix the fruits and nuts in another bowl, and combine with the dry ingredients. Then, lightly whisk the eggs together with the honey and add that to the dry mixture.

Fruity cake filling mixture

Now at this point Yvette tells me to 'add water until the mixture becomes creamy. This may be 50 ml, this may be 75'. However, my mixture was already pretty creamy. I checkt again, and turns out my apricots and prunes weren't actually the dried-dried fruits she mentioned, but just semi-dried and stuck in a package. So I didn't add any water. But if you have proper dried fruits, I'd add some water.

Pour the mixture into the prepared caketin and bake for about 40-50 minutes.

Now the only raising agents in this cake are the bicarbonate and the four eggs (lightly whisked) while there is a lot of heavy fruit in there. I was very curious to see whether this would come out looking anything like a cake, or more a stodgy lump. Luckily, I need not have worried.

Fruity fruitcake

It was a proper cake, although not really the lightest cake I've ever eaten. Chock full of fruits and nuts, with sweetness from the cinnamon and honey coming through, while ate the same time feeling very very healthy. Not much of the almond flavour coming through, although the texture is a bit different than with a wheat flour cake. Still, I do think wheat flour would work.

The recipe picker declared this 'the best cake he'd ever eaten', so all was well in that regard.

Because I used so many large 'wet' fruits, the cake does somewhat fall apart when you slice it. If I'd known this beforehand, I would have cut the fruit in smaller pieces. So; dried fruits are okay to be a bit on the large size, fresh fruit should be cut. But that is mostly a logistical issue; flavour wise, it is great!