Porter Cake

This is a cake my mum was making for a friend’s birthday. Sorry about some of the pictures, she was left alone with the camera while I was out… Also I can’t show you what I looks like inside because it would be a bit weird to cut someone’s birthday cake open. I am assured however that it is very nice. It’s essentially a boozy fruit cake, which would not be my cup of tea but I imagine would be nice if you’re into that kind of thing.

Ingredients

350g plain flour

¼ tsp mixed spice

175g butter

275g soft brown sugar

450g mixed dried fruit

50g glacee cherries, chopped

50g walnuts, chopped

Zest of 1 lemon

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

150ml warm porter stout

3 eggs, beaten

Preheat oven to 140⁰C.

Line and grease a 20cm round cake tin and tie a band of brown paper around it to protect the cake from burning.

Sift the flour and mixed spice into a large mixing bowl. Add the butter cut into slices to the flour and rub into crumbs using your fingertips.

Stir in the sugar, fruit, nuts and lemon zest and mix well.

Dissolve the bicarbonate into the warm stout.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the beaten eggs and stout mixture.

Mix everything well.

Pour into the tin and bake for 2 hours, then reduce the heat to 120⁰C and bake for a further hour or until a skewer comes out clean. Cool in the tin.

As an extra note on birthday cakes, I keep forgetting to mention the cake I made for my housemate’s 21^st weeks ago. I wasn’t able to actually blog about it properly because I didn’t have time to take pictures of every stage but here’s what it looked like in the end.

It’s supposed to be an Apple iPod (hope you got that…) in bright green because that’s his favourite colour. It’s a basic chocolate sponge mix with butter cream on top. It was exciting for me because I got to use my new Lakeland hemisphere pan for the first time to get the 3D effect for the Apple logo. I then used the Dr Oetker silver spray to decorate it and I was surprised how well it came out.