Patter Cake, Patter Cake Baker's Man.....

"Pat a cake pat a cake baker's man
Make me a cake as fast as you can
Pat it and prick it and mark it with B
And put it in the oven for baby and me!"

Not quite baked as fast as i could, in fact it took a lot longer than i thought but then the recipe i found/used and made up myself didn't have a time or temperature for baking! So that was guess work on my part, and even then i was still worried it wasn't cooked! I wanted to find a healthier recipe, so that hopefully i would/will feel able to eat some.

My only concern is if it will be sweet enough, as i used no added sugar apple juice to soak the dried fruit in. However there is so much dried fruit in it that i'm hoping that will give the sweetness, it should do. The batter tasted very bitter because there is no sugar added into the recipe i found, but once it was cooked it smelt a lot more like a dessert cake rather than some thing savoury!

you can really see the dried fruit here! I chose my own selection of dried fruit to go in rather than just plain old mixed dried fruit that you get in a bag that contains yucky bits like peel!

Recipe

225g dried fruit (i used a 125g berry mix from Tesco, 50g dried apricots and 50g prunes)

330ml apple juice

225g wholemeal flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp mixed spice (which i found we'd run out of so i made my own mix of cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger)

120g low fat spread

2 eggs

• Soak the fruit in the apple juice for 1 hour
• Grease and Line a round baking tin (mine about 8" diameter i think)
• Preheat the oven to 170C (again my estimation)
• Crumb together the spread and flour, baking powder and mixed spice in a large bowl
• beat in the eggs (i had to add a little of the apple juice the fruit was in to make it wet enough to be able to beat in)
• add the apple juice and stir in the dried fruit
• pour into prepared tin and bake for......

well i think in the end it took about an hour and a half (90 mins), but i'd cheque with a skewer however if it doesn't come out clean, check in anpther place because there is so much dried fruit in it the chance are you've stuck it in some of that. the prunes especially are very sticky and make the cake mixture stay soft and doughy round the edges of them.

So there we go. One super healthy cake, all that remains now is to taste it! Which will happen over the next week, so i shall let you know at the end of the week whether it is all gone due to be eating or due to being fed to the birds!