Trinidadian · Dessert
Trinidadian Black Cake
- Advanced
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, richness that coats and comforts, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 500 g mixed dried fruit: prunes, raisins, currants, glacé cherries
- 250 ml dark rum, plus 50 ml for feeding
- 250 ml cherry brandy
- 200 g caster sugar, for the browning
- 60 ml boiling water
- 250 g unsalted butter, soft
- 250 g dark muscovado sugar
- 5 large eggs
- 250 g plain flour
- 5 g baking powder
- 5 g mixed spice
- zest of 1 lime
- 10 ml vanilla extract
- 10 ml Angostura bitters
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Creaming butter & sugarFolding: keeping the air inThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Blitz the dried fruit coarse, cover it with the rum and cherry brandy in a jar, and leave it in the dark: two weeks is the minimum, a year is normal.
- Melt the caster sugar alone in a heavy pan over medium heat, past amber to a smoking near black that no longer smells sweet, then take it off the heat and pour in the boiling water at arm's length. It will erupt. Swirl to a loose syrup and cool.
- Cream the butter and muscovado until light, beat in the eggs one at a time, then fold in the flour, baking powder, spice, zest, vanilla, bitters, the drained fruit with 100 ml to 150 ml of its liquor, and enough browning to bring the batter to the colour of wet earth. Only fruit soaked for months takes up all of its liquor, so bottle what is left for feeding.
- Bake in a double lined 23 cm tin at 150C (300F) for 2 hours to 2.5 hours, until a skewer comes out with crumbs on it but no wet batter. 120 min
- Spoon the remaining rum over the cake while it is hot and let it cool in its tin.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Creaming butter & sugar 28 recipes
- The butter started at the right temperature: it took a fingerprint and held its shape, neither greasy and slumping nor hard from the fridge.
- It has visibly paled, from yellow towards near-white, and grown in volume, and getting there took minutes rather than seconds.
- The texture is light and aerated: a spoonful is fluffy and holds a soft peak rather than sitting dense on the spoon.
- Rubbed between finger and thumb it is still faintly gritty with undissolved sugar, and not slick or oily.
- It is one homogeneous cream: not split, slackened, or separating into a greasy mass with liquid running out of it.
Where it goes wrong The butter was too warm, or it was beaten well past its point, so the fat softened and gave up the air it had taken: the mixture goes slack and oily and the cake bakes dense and greasy with a sunken middle.
Folding: keeping the air in 34 recipes
- The air was actually built first and it shows: whatever was creamed or whipped has changed colour and grown in volume, pale and light rather than dense.
- The two mixtures were brought closer before being combined: a little of the light one worked into the heavy one first, so the rest is not beaten flat trying to move it.
- Folded and not stirred: a broad implement down through the middle, across the base, up and over, with the bowl turned between strokes.
- Stopped the moment the streaks disappear. It is still visibly aerated and holds its shape briefly when the spoon lifts away.
- Into the tin and into the oven straight away: a batter left standing on the bench gives back the air it was built for.
Where it goes wrong It was stirred until it looked perfectly smooth. Every stroke past the point where the streaks vanish knocks out air that cannot be put back, so the bake comes out dense and short of the tin, and often wet through the middle where there was no structure to hold it.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Moscato d’Asti
- Also Right
- Late-harvest Riesling
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling elderflower
Citrus desserts need a wine sweeter than they are, with acid enough to keep up: light, frothy, and low-proof wins.
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