Nuts In Baking

Cakes are soft and spongy and often have the various creams and chocolates – well, ordinary cakes that is. When you chop and use candied and/or dried fruits, nuts and spices you come up with extremely different genre of cake.

In the years gone by, before wedding cakes began to get all the fancy icing and became huge and ostentatious, it used to be the tradition in UK to have only this variety of cake for wedding celebrations and often a piece was kept by the couple – to be had at their first wedding anniversary.

Which Nuts

The earliest recipe from ancient Rome includes pomegranate seeds, pine nuts and raisins that were mixed into a mash of barley. A few centuries later, during the middle ages, preserved fruits were being added and the term fruitcake (for the cake not to indicate a mad human being) was used.

Today almost all nuts, including hazelnuts, pecans and a host of others are used in cakes of different variations but initially Europeans were baking fruitcakes using nuts from the harvest – for good luck in the following year, saved and eaten before the harvest of the next year, so often a year old.

Soaking of Nuts

To imbue the nuts with flavours additional to their inherent aroma, it was customary to soak them in alcohol spiked with spices. Probably the German stole the recipe that originated five hundred years ago has dried fruits and almonds with spices that give it a totally distinct flavour. The German cake has more ratio of cake batter as compared to nuts and fruits, especially when compared to the American fruitcakes.

Methodology of Cake Baking