This is not a traditional fruit cake, but does capture the spirit of fruit cake and has a flavor with wider appeal. I made this cake over the weekend for my “Festive, Frosty, Fruitcake” holiday party. It’s sweet, buttery, and moist. Even better is that it tastes great for days after baking so it is perfect for a party where you want to prepare food in advance.
This cake is very good and very forgiving. I had to make a number of substitutions because I was baking it during the blizzard and it still tasted wonderful. In the past I’ve avoided spice cakes and spice cookies because I hadn’t really enjoyed them that much. I was drawn to this recipe because of the orange cream cheese frosting and am so glad I tried it. I think my aversion to “spice” desserts isn’t because of the spices, but because they so often contain molasses and I don’t enjoy molasses. This cake is sweetened with sugar so the spices are able to be the prominent flavor.
This cake also taught me a valuable lesson. Do not buy whole cardomom when you need ground cardomom and just figure, “It can’t be that hard to grind, right?” It turns out when you don’t own a spice grinder or a mortar and pestal it can be THAT hard to grind. I spent a good 20 minutes crushing the pods, extracting the seeds, and then grinding the seeds multiple times seeds in my pepper mill in an attempt to get them fine enough. The strange part is I didn’t get all all annoyed. The whole process was so absurd that I found it pretty funny.
