Winter Eggless Fruit Cake

After spending a delightful 5 months with us, my parents left for India this week. I got used to having them around so much, the house feels extremely empty, and maybe the heart somewhat more so. The following morning we woke up to find our neighborhood covered in a snowy blanket. We don't usually get this much snow. My son's school was closed due to the inclement weather. 

We decided to take advantage of the snow and make our very own snowman (or snowbird) in the backyard.

Anyway, after freezing for an hour outside we came inside and planned to do some work together, as my son wanted to help me bake a cake. I thought of baking a traditional fruit cake. While working on it, I was remembering my parents even more as my last cake was a coffee cake, when my parents were staying with us. They loved it so much that they ate the cake for lunch 😊. Fruit cakes always bring back lots of nice childhood memories too. We always used to look forward to eating fruitcakes that my parents would bring home on christmas eve from the Anglo-Indian bakeries in our city. They taste significantly different from any other cake. Not sure if it were the cake or the festive season had something to do with it. They were a little hard, fruity, and looked brown. Although it used to have rum in it, I didn't use rum in my cake. If you wish you can soak the fruits in rum for a couple of nights before baking. Also, this time I decided to make it eggless, for which I followed the recipe from Joy of Baking.   

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

3/4 cup fine brown sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1 cup buttermilk (if you don't have buttermilk at home you can make buttermilk by mixing 1 tbsp white vinegar to 1 cup of plain milk and let it sit in the room temperature for 10 minutes. you will see the milk gets curdled a little bit)

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup dried fruits and nuts (I have used raisins, dried cranberries, dried apricot, candied pecan, walnut, cashew)

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Recipe:

Mix the dry ingredients first

Melt the butter and add to the dry ingredients

Add the buttermilk and vanilla extract

Mix everything very well with a spatula

Spray oil on a loaf pan

Pour the mixture

Bake at 350F for 1 hour

A skewer inserted comes out clean says your cake is ready