OMG forgive me for I have sinned. I ate a quarter of the cake while it was still warm and I don’t even care 🤩. In my defence I had lard left over from the pork pies and we’ve run out of butter, so it was really a case of just using up what we had. Nothing to do with big fat lardy GREED, honest. I found a recipe online by Victoria Glass that didn’t require any butter then adapted it to work with what we had. Bloody Hell it was worth it.
450g strong white flour
1tsp salt
100g caster sugar
2x7g sachets instant yeast
150g lard cut into small cubes
300ml milk, warmed up
1 heaped tsp cinnamon
1tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground ginger
250g mixed dried fruit (I used cranberries and golden raisins)
Mix the flour, yeast, salt and a tablespoon of the sugar then rub in 50g of the lard. Pour in most of the warm milk and bring to a dough with your hands, using more of the milk if required. Knead for 10 minutes then cover and leave to rise til doubled in size (1-2 hours).
Leave the rest of the lard to soften. Line a 25cm cake tin, and mix the rest of the sugar with the spices.
Knock back the dough and roll to a rectangle roughly 1cm thick. With the short side facing you dot 1/3 of the lard over the surface, then scatter over 1/3 of the sugar and fruit pressing in with your hands. Fold the top 3rd of the dough down and the bottom third up to cover, rotate by a quarter turn then roll out to the same size as before. Repeat the process twice to use up the remaining ingredients then form the dough to fit inside your tin. Cover with a tea towel and leave to rise til doubled again; about an hour. Heat the oven to 190 fan and bake for 40-50 minutes.
Supposedly best eaten warm but I’ll take it any which way.
