Recipe: Our Favourite Cake for Morning Tea
We take food pretty seriously here at Murray River Trails. From breakfast to dessert, our menus are designed in partnership with amazing bush food chef, Andrew Fielke, and the brief is to create nourishing meals with local and native ingredients. You can read more about how we use native ingredients here.
But there are a few other important people involved in menu design and they are our guides!
Our guides could all be contestants for My Kitchen Rules, they are fantastic cooks and some of their family recipes are featured in our menu.
Most Requested recipe
One of the most sought after recipes was Heather’s boiled fruit cake, which if you’re walking with Heather, you’ll be lucky enough to sample.
This is our favourite cake for morning tea on the trail, it pairs perfectly with a cup of warm Earl Grey tea and the fruit and nut offers a boost of energy to sustain you onto lunch.
This cake is robust and can survive the most vigorous packing of your day pack and this recipe will provide you with enough cake to feed 20 people! It also freezes like a dream.
We hope you enjoy making this at home, please be sure to share your creations with us on social media!
Heather's Boiled Fruit Cake Recipe
(adapted from CWA cookbook – ‘Seventy years in the kitchen’)
Ingredients
- 3 eggs
- 220g sugar (use dark brown sugar for a darker cake)
- 180g pitted chopped dates
- 125g sultanas
- 125g raisins
- 60g chopped walnuts (use additional walnuts for topping if desired)
- 1 tablespoon mixed peel
- 100g chopped dried apricots (optional)
- 500ml water
- 115g chopped butter
- 300g plain flour
- 1 teaspoon mixed spice
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- Half teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
- 1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
Method
- Prepare a 20 cm round or square cake tin. Heat oven to 180⁰C
- Cream eggs and sugar together in a bowl.
- Put dates, sultanas, raisins, peel and apricots (if using) in a saucepan
- add the water, bring to boil and boil for 10 minutes
- Add the chopped butter, stir, and remove from heat
- Allow to cool slightly
- Sift flour, spices, cream of tartar and bicarbonate soda into the creamed sugar/ egg mixture
- Mix lightly, then add the fruit mixture and walnuts and mix well
- Spoon into prepared cake tin, sprinkle top with extra walnuts (and a little extra brown sugar if you like)
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