Nuts & Fruits 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.

The earliest recipe from ancient Rome included 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 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.

To imbue the nuts with flavours additional to their inherent aroma, it was customary to soak them in alcohol spiked with spices. Soaking of nuts in liquor is recommended for anything from 12 hours to 24 hours but if you leave them longer - it might not be harmful to the nuts; though might not give increased improvement in the result. A liquor, a liqueur or plain water soaking would get you the desired feel of the nuts.

Cake Baking

The two methods of making cakes followed by bakers are 'The Creaming' method and the 'Wet then Dry' method. In the Creaming the ingredients usually include butter, sugar, eggs, milk and the dry products including the flour, raising agent and any additions of nuts. Cream butter is not melted, just softened with sugar. Eggs are added one by one - all additions of nuts are done before milk and flour to avoid over-mixing the flour.