Pacific Christmas Cake with Tropical Fruit & White Chocolate

I know a lot of you haven’t even celebrated Thanks Giving yet and won’t even be thinking about Christmas yet but most of us don’t have Thanks Giving and therefore Christmas is our nearest feast to start thinking about!

I make Christmas cake every year, it’s a tradition for me which dates back even before I was a teenager, I remember my Nan teaching me all the steps and telling me how important it was to be made weeks in advance so it could be soaked over a period of time with brandy. I have always made a traditional cake as per her recipe with an addition her and there , last year I added bitter chocolate which you can find here. This year I decided I needed to go a little more Pacific style since I have been living in NZ for 9 years. The Pacific cake is based on my ‘no fail’ recipe but I have exchanged the traditional fruits for mango, pineapple, papaya etc with the addition of white chocolate and Bacardi to soak the fruit in. I was really pleased with the results and the tropical fruits certainly suit the warmer climate we have here during Christmas, that’s if the cake lasts that long! I hope you will enjoy it too.

The recipe make a 22cm round cake tin.

Ingredients

1 cup chopped dried mango
1 cup chopped dried papaya
1 cup chopped dried pineapple
1 cup glace cherries
1 cup chopped apricots
1 cup dried cranberries
100g white chocolate, chopped small
1 cup macadamia nuts, chopped
1 cup of Bacardi rum
300g butter, softened
1.25 cups brown sugar
4 eggs
2. 25 cups of SR Flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger

Method

Place all the fruit and nuts in a bowl and pour over the Barcardi rum and allow to soak over night.
Preheat the oven to 140 degrees centigrade.
Grease and line the cake tin with greaseproof paper, allowing the greaseproof paper to come up the sides 4 centimetres higher than the cake tin.
Beat the sugar and butter together until light and fluffy.
Add one egg at a time and beat the mixture in between each addition.
Add the flour, white chocolate and spices to the fruit and mix together, ensuring all the fruit is evenly coated.
Add the butter mixture to the fruit and flour and mix together till well combined.
Spoon mixture into cake tin then cover with a circle of greaseproof paper to protect the top from going too brown.
Bake for 2 hours, 15 minutes and then check the cake with a skewer. If the skewer does not come out clean bake for a further 10 minutes and test again. repeat process until baked through.
Allow to cool in the tin to retain the moisture.
Wrap in tin foil, glad wrap or a cake tin until ready to ice or serve.