Fruitless Christmas cake challenge!

Gettingtherequickly

My friend has tasked me with making a cake, but she hates raisins, sultanas & currants. Cherries are fine, a little bit of mixed peel and will tolerate flaked almonds.

As she likes the idea of the cake being fed between now and Christmas, does anyone have any recipes that would suit? I imagine that I can use dates, but would prefer not to use alot?

Thanks muchly

oldtractor

Make a chocolate cake.

Seakay

Christmas cakes can be made using any fruit and nuts, just use your usual recipe and keep the weights the same.
Other options would be dried cranberries, crystallised ginger, chopped walnuts, dried apple chopped, dried pear chopped, dried mango chopped, crystallised pineapple, crystallised papaya.

Fen1

Panettone?

Well_Preserved

I've used a madeira cake as my son doesn't like the fruit & none of us are very keen of icing but we like marzipan - you can quite easily put marzipan on madeira! It keeps a bit better than sponge cakes so I don't have to do it last minute; sometimes I make it in advance & freeze it until Christmas Eve.

One advantage [or disadvantage depending on how you look at it!] is that we're not eating it for weeks after Christmas!

Didn't there used to be a trend towards recipes like Tunis cake some years ago? I guess other nations have special cakes, like the panettone & buche de noel?

Gettingtherequickly

Thanks for the ideas, something for me to work on. I have tried to thank the posts, but not allowed for some reason!

Gigervamp

You'd need a high percentage of fruit in the cake if your friend wants to *feed* it booze, otherwise you'll end up with a soggy mess!

chirpychick

My husband has a lot of allergies mainly to nuts and fruits, we dont like alcohol and i find making Christmas cakes to be really expensive so this year i am going to be making a sponge cake and decorate it in white frosting to look like snow
I know you said your friend likes the idea of feeding the cake but it wont work unless it is a heavily laden fruit cake so i dont think it would even be possible..... HTH

Seakay

Saw this recipe today and thought of gettingtherequickly.
http://www.foodloversbritain.com/FoodMatters/Recipies/Breads--Cakes/Italian-Christmas-Cake/
There are some vine fruits in it but very few and they could easily be replaced with other dried fruit such as mulberries etc

adelight

Seakay wrote: »

Saw this recipe today and thought of gettingtherequickly.
http://www.foodloversbritain.com/FoodMatters/Recipies/Breads--Cakes/Italian-Christmas-Cake/
There are some vine fruits in it but very few and they could easily be replaced with other dried fruit such as mulberries etc

That looks amazing, I might do it for christmas with a chocolate nut sauce (i'm addicted to anything reminiscent of nutella, especialy on christmas pudding/cake).