Ladies Who Lunch

Once a week I meet up with a group of lovely ladies for a Bible study and a 'bring and share' lunch.  The past few weeks I've been a bit lazy and taken along something shop bought but I have a tad more time on my hands now so decided to be adventurous.  My contribution for this weeks lunch is an experimental fruit cake that actually turned out rather well so I figured I'd share the recipe. It's a really lovely dark fruity cake that's very simple to make and goes perfectly with a nice cup of tea.

I started off by soaking about 200g of chopped dried figs in 240ml of boiling water with 30g of butter and a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. You'll need to give this a good stir until the butter has all melted and then set aside to cool.

I then beat two eggs together with 140g of soft dark brown sugar.  The sugar gives the cake it's lovely dark colour.  Now mix in the cooled fig mixture along with 280g of sifted plain flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp nutmeg and a tsp cinnamon. All that's left to do now is throw in 100g of chopped dried dates and give it a good stir.

Pour the mixture into a deep round cake tin, I like to grease and line mine, and pop it in the oven at 180 degrees.  It will need to bake for around an hour or so.

And there you have it, a really simple but very tasty date and fig cake.