Dundee cake keeps very well in an airtight tin and tastes all the better if kept for a few days before cutting.

instructions written by Fiona Cairnes for making the tamarind fruit cake batter, icing, cake decorations and assembly, so now you can recreate the royal wedding cake in your own home. If you want to decorate, I would just do wide ribbon around each layer to hide the seam and some simple flowers cascading from the top. I like a smooth cake since I am not that good at doodling scroll work and such. The single recipe is for one 10-inch fruitcake without icing, which you can make for the holidays. To make the wedding cake, you need to double the recipe. It uses delicious, versatile almond flour, which is now easy to find due to the demand for gluten free flour.

Fiona's fruit cake without icing. Courtesy of "Bake & Decorate," Rodale Press

Vintage Glamour Wedding Cake

A Note From Pastry Chef Fiona Cairns:
A beautiful three-tiered timeless classic, this could take center stage at any wedding feast. It can be baked and decorated at least a month in advance and there are no colors to mix as the entire scheme is in ivory fondant with highlights of gold (you could also make this cake in white and gold.) If you break down each stage, giving yourself plenty of time, you may find it easier than you think.

Serves about 120-150 people

Ingredients for the Cake:

One 6-inch square (3-inch deep) square cake pan
One 8-inch square (3-inch deep) square cake pan
One 10-inch square (3-inch deep) square cake pan

• Double the recipe for Rich Tamarind Fruit Cake batter (recipe below)

• 6 tablespoons brandy, plus more to feed the cake

• 1 cup apricot jam, gently warmed and pushed through a sieve

• 6 3/4 pounds marzipan

• confectioners’ sugar, for rolling

Sizes for Cake Boards and Drums:

One 8-inch square thin board One 10-inch square thin board

One 12-inch square thin board One 6-inch square (1/2-inch thick) cake drum

One 8-inch square (1/2-inch thick) cake drum One 10-inch square (1/2-inch thick) cake drum

Preparing the Rich Tamarind Fruit Cake:

Single cake makes 25-30 slices

A Note from Fiona Cairns About the Recipe:
I started my business using this particularly moist, dark recipe as a Christmas cake, producing hundreds of

slice of vintage glamour fruitcake-note the layer of marzipan covered with the layer of fondant. The royal icing is for piping and glueing the decorations.

miniatures cooked in baked bean cans from my kitchen table. It has been tweaked by adding tamarind — my husband’s bright idea. Make it up to three months in advance, or at least a week before you want it, to let it mature and absorb the brandy.

Ingredients for the Fruit Cake:

• 1 1/2 cups candied cherries

• 2 cups golden raisins

• 2 cups dark raisins, preferably Thompson

• 1 1/4 cups mixed candied citrus peel

• 2/3 cup chopped crystallized ginger

• 1/2 cup dried currants

• 3 tablespoons molasses

• 3 tablespoons bitter orange marmalade

• 1 teaspoon tamarind concentrate

• finely grated zest of 1 organic orange

• finely grated zest of 1 organic lemon

• 1 heaped tablespoon apple pie spice

• 6 tablespoons brandy, plus 3 tablespoons to feed the cake

• 1 cup walnuts

• 1/3 cup blanched almonds

• 1 1/4 cups self-rising flour

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened, plus more for the pan

• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons packed brown sugar

• 1 1/2 cups almond flour

• 5 large eggs, lightly beaten

Preparing the Fruit Cake Batter:

The day before, rinse the cherries, then dry them well with paper towels and cut each in half. Place the golden and dark raisins, mixed peel, ginger, currants, cherries, molasses, marmalade, tamarind paste, zests and spice into a large bowl. Pour in 6 tablespoons of brandy, stir well, cover with plastic wrap and let stand overnight.

The next day, preheat the oven to 275 degrees F. Lightly butter a 9-inch springform pan and line the bottom and sides with parchment paper. Wrap the outside of the pan with brown paper and tie with string, to protect the cake from scorching in the oven.

Spread the nuts on a baking sheet. Bake for 10 minutes in the oven, shaking once. Cool slightly, chop coarsely and set aside.

Combining the Fruit Cake Ingredients

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl. In an electric mixer on high speed, beat the butter and sugar for at least 5 minutes until it turns pale and fluffy. Add the ground almonds, then very gradually the eggs, mixing well between each addition. Fold in the flour with a large metal spoon and then the soaked fruits (and any liquid) and nuts.

Spread the batter into the pan. Bake on an oven rack in the lower third of the oven for about 2 1/2-3 hours. If a wooden toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, it is ready. If it browns too much before it is fully cooked, make a circle of foil a bit larger than the cake, pierce a hole in the center and open it up, then place it over the pan.

Let cool in the pan. Pierce all over with a wooden toothpick and evenly sprinkle over the remaining 3 tablespoons brandy. Remove from the pan and discard the paper. Wrap in fresh parchment paper, then aluminum foil, and let stand for a week or up to three months. Unwrap and sprinkle with with 1 tablespoon more brandy every other week, if you like, for extra succulence and booziness!

The magic happens when butter meets sugar, flour meets eggs - and little handmade masterpieces emerge from the oven to delight even the most discerning of palettes. I dare you to try one of her cakes an not be immediately hooked. This is the cake book to end all cake books. All the media attention would boost this sleeper little cookbook sales through the roof.

Preparing the Wedding Cake Boards and Pans:

Thin cake boards are used only while you are assembling the cakes, and really serve to save your work surfaces. You can use any board you have, even plywood. Thick cake drums are used to support each tier of the finished cake, so must be bought for this purpose.

Prepare the cake pans and batter (see above). Divide the batter between the pans, filling each to the same depth. The smallest cake will take about 1 hour and 45 minutes, the medium 2 1/2-3 hours and the largest about 3 hours: if a wooden toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, it is ready. Let cool in the pans. When cooled, pierce all over with a fine wooden skewer and sprinkle with the brandy. Wrap in fresh parchment paper, then aluminum foil, until ready to use. You can continue to feed the cakes with 1-2 tablespoons brandy every other week, for a month or two.

Using Marzipan for the Cakes:

Take the 8-inch thin board and place the 6-inch drum on it. Brush 1 tablespoon apricot jam into the center, then place the 6-inch cake on top, upside down so the flat bottom forms the surface. If it is slightly smaller than the drum, make a strip of marzipan as wide as the side of the cake and the same circumference, and stick it to the edge. Similarly, all cakes should be the same height. If not, apply an extra-thin marzipan layer to the top of the shallow cake (use the pan as a guide). Repeat for the other cakes, placing the 8-inch cake on the same-size drum and 10-inch board, and the 10-inch cake on the same-size drum and 12-inch board.

Brush the 6-inch cake with jam. Knead 1 3/4 pounds of marzipan until pliable. Sprinkle a work surface and rolling pin with confectioners’ sugar, and roll out into a rough square slightly larger than the top and sides of the cake and drum and about 1/4-inch thick. Lift on to the cake and drum, smooth all over and cut away any excess. Cover the other two cakes, using 2 1/4 pounds marzipan each. Leave overnight to firm up.

Assembling the Wedding Cake:

Items Needed for Cake Construction:

12-inch square (1/2-inch thick) cake drum and eight wooden dowels

Ingredients for Covering the Cake:

• Confectioners sugar, for rolling

• 9 pounds ivory fondant

• 2 tablespoons brandy or boiled water

• 2/3 cup royal icing in a parchment paper cone

Preparing the Base Drum:

Dust the 12-inch drum with confectioners sugar and sprinkle with a small amount of water. Knead 2 1/4 pounds of the fondant until pliable, then sprinkle a work surface and rolling pin with confectioners sugar and roll it into a rough square slightly larger than the top of the drum and about 1/8-inch thick. Wrap it loosely around the rolling pin and lift on to the drum. Smooth with your hands and trim away any excess. Replace the excess in a plastic bag and seal. Let dry overnight.

Preparing the Icing Cover for the Cake:

The 6-inch cake will need about 1 3/4 pounds of fondant, and the two larger cakes about 2 1/4 pounds each. Work on just one cake at a time.

For each cake, brush brandy all over the marzipan. This helps the fondant to stick and is an antiseptic. Lightly dust a clean surface with confectioners’ sugar and roll out the fondant into a rough square about 1/4-inch thick and slightly larger than the diameter of the cakes, their sides, and the drums.

Lift the fondant with your hands, place it over the cake and gently smooth, covering the cake and drum. Do not stretch, and work as quickly as you can, before it dries. Cut away any excess, provided it is still clean, and seal in a plastic bag. Let the three cakes stand overnight.

Building the Cake:

Spread 1-2 tablespoons royal icing into the center of the base drum. Gently ease away the largest cake and drum from its board using an icing spatula and place it exactly in the middle of the base drum.

Now insert four dowels into the large cake, spacing them to form the corners of a square just within where the 8-inch cake will sit. Push down each stick until it hits the drum, and mark with a pen about 1/8-inch above the surface. Remove each stick, score with a knife at the mark, snap (or saw) and discard the excess. Replace each in its hole.

Spread a spoonful of royal icing into the center of the largest cake, remove the 8-inch cake and drum from its thin board and center on top of the larger cake, resting the drum on the hidden dowels. Repeat the dowel placing process with this middle tier to add the top cake, again using a spoonful of royal icing to keep it steady.

the master baker

Preparing the Decorations for the Cake

Ingredients for the Adornments:

Confectioners sugar, for rolling

Set of 3 blossom plunger cutters (1/4-inch, 1/2-inch and 5/8-inch)

1 1/4-inch butterfly cutter

2 tablespoons royal icing in a parchment paper cone

100 small gold dragees in 2 sizes (optional); I used 50 medium and 50 small gold dragees

1 small paint brush

1 large egg white, lightly beaten (or 2 teaspoons dried egg white mixed with water until frothy)

Edible gold glitter

Two small artificial ivory or white doves (or other birds)

For the Top Tier: 2 feet long, 1 1/2-inch wide vintage gold ribbon

For the Middle Tier: Cream organza about 1 yard long, 1 1/2-inch wide and gold ribbon 6 1/4 feet long and 1/4-inch wide.

For the Bottom Tier: Gold bejewelled ribbon about 4 feet long and 2 1/2-inch wide.

For the Base Drum: One roll double-sided sticky tape and ivory ribbon about 4 1/2 feet long, 1/2-inch wide.

Instructions for Making Butterflies and Blossoms:

You will need about 12-15 butterflies and about 100 blossoms in three sizes (I made 25 tiny 1/4-inch blossoms, 25 medium 1/2-inch blossoms and 50 large 5/8-inch blossoms).

The decorations are applied randomly, so this is just a guide. Knead some of the fondant left over from covering the cakes and drums until pliable, and roll out thinly (no more than 1/8-inch thick) on a board sprinkled with a little confectioners’ sugar. Stamp out the blossoms and butterflies and allow to dry for a few hours, preferably overnight. I lay them out as I make them in boxes interleaved with parchment paper. Prop up the butterflies’ wings between two sticks (you could use spare dowels), so the wings will dry as if in flight.

If you like, pipe the centers of the blossoms with a tiny dot of royal icing and then press on a gold dragee. If you prefer, just pipe a dot for the centers. Once the butterflies are dry, paint the edges of the wings with egg white and dip into the glitter.

To finish the cake, apply the ribbons by sticking them at the back of each cake using a little royal icing. On the middle tier, overlay the wide organza ribbon with two bands of narrow gold ribbon. Wrap the base drum with the double-sided sticky tape, then stick on its ribbon.

Casual, informal designs do have one huge advantage: any blemishes or marks in the icing can be covered by a decoration! Randomly apply the butterflies and little blossoms all over the three-tiered cake, sticking on with the royal icing. As a final touch, place the two doves in the center of the top tier.

About Fiona Cairnes

Fiona Cairns made the cake for 2011′s Royal Wedding. Her greatest innovation was the miniature cake – since widely copied – and first sold to the Conran Shop while working from her kitchen table. Her company now bakes 750,000 exquisite cakes every year for Waitrose, Harrods, Selfridges, Fortnum & Mason, and Le Bon Marche in Paris. She also makes Sir Paul McCartney’s Christmas cake every year. Despite the fact that her bakery doubled in size in 2010, Fiona loves home baking and still makes cakes at home for friends and family.

Text copyright Beth Hensperger 2011

Please enjoy the recipe and make it your own. If you copy the recipe and text for internet use, please include my byline and link to my site.

Cherry Orchard in Winter by Arlette

The Olson cherry orchards were the last remnants of a day gone by when the Santa Clara Valley was spoken in the same breath as the heartland of France and Armenia, premier fruit growing regions of the Western world.  To newcomers to the Silicon Valley, it must be a stretch of the imagination to think this valley was a virtual Garden of Eden, fertile fields geometrically planted with all the common fruit trees–apricot, pear, cherry, and prune plums.  All are members of the rose family, so their blossoms upon close inspection look like tiny single-petaled roses.  The mass flowering of the these trees in early spring was a beautiful sight with the vivid green of the coastal range providing the background.

Apricot trees were first brought to California with the Franciscan friars and planted around the missions.  The first housing developments south of Palo Alto were carved into the center of the vast apricot orchards and I grew up under their boughs.  I used to sit in the the crook of the trees and eat my fill of tree-ripened golden-pink orbs in the first heat of summer, then pick a bag for my mom to make her double-crusted apricot pie and a Bisquick fruit-topped cobbler (the Bisquick website still has the recipe).

As a pre-teen, I would ride at 7 AM on the handlebars of my girlfriend’s bike to the Marinovitch orchard on Oak Avenue in Los Altos and cut cots alongside the Mexican workers in the steamy heat of early summer for $1.00 a tray, good money in those days for a kid.  Velvet-skinned Blenheim apricots have a distinctive perfume that is heady stuff on a hot day in a cutting shed.  Peak seasons record 200,000 tons of apricots picked in this area, much of it going to nearby canning factories and laid out on weathered shallow trays for sun-drying.

My boyfriend Steve’s parents had a large, sweet cherry tree on the corner of their property in Mountain View.  We would look up at that tree while it was ripening and lick our lips in anticipation.  The day would finally come when his dad would pronounce that they were ripe and arrange the old weathered fruit-picker’s ladder, which is wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, against the trunk.  His dad would pick while we waited at the bottom of the ladder, and to his bemused irritation, eating all the cherries as fast as he would pick them.  There is an age-old art to plucking a dangling cherry off its short stem with your lips, manipulating the fruit off the pit in your mouth, then expelling the clean pit out with a short, swift blow.  Probably Black Tartarians, they were so dark purple they were bordering on black and almost painfully sweet.  It was a sad day when the tree was too old to bear anymore and had to be removed.  Picking and eating fresh cherries is such as joy that it is a sorry state of affairs to have to buy cherries at the supermarket.

Steve’s grandparents had this remarkable backyard. They picked the lot special since it was the biggest when they moved from San Francisco to Saratoga. It was a corner lot and and it was fence to fence fruit trees, vegetables, flowers, and berry bushes. Grampy took me out one day to pick the blackberries. I was in a lot of pain with the piercing of my fingertips by the long thin thorns. There is a sort of mantra that goes with berry picking: “Oh, scratches are a PART of blackberry picking, that’s why they taste so good!” Grampy, whose fingertips were calloused from decades of home farming, would look up with a small smile on his face, and said to me, don’t worry, you will forget the pain soon when you eat them. Granny waited inside and then we poured fresh cream over the berries and let them chill until after our omelettes. Granny also made jam and jelly from these, currants, and raspberries, which were a loving treat. We used to go there every Sunday for brunch and I always left with bags full of whatever vegetable and fruit were in season plus some home canned item.

There were tons of peach trees when I moved to Santa Clara Valley with my family in 1962. Especially loved were the delicate white peaches that dotted the back yards. I had a friend who had a few trees and would invite me over to pick up a paper grocery bag full of them. Best eaten raw out of hand, I still made pies and crisps, but packed the excess peeled sliced peaches in clean half gallon milk cartons for storage in the freezer. White peaches are for canning, not for jam. My Nanny Hensperger always had jars of white peach halves down the cellar. She would take me down and hold back the floral cloth that covered the old shelf that was full of her canned goods. It was always a treat to look forward to when she allowed me to pick what jar to serve for dessert. As the years went by, there was a peach blight in the valley that in the next decade wiped out all the peach trees. If you loved peaches, you had to plant a new tree.

The history of the French prune plum coincides with the history of this valley.  French nurseryman Louis Pellier settled in the southern part of the valley in 1859, bringing with him the much loved D’Agen plum with his belongings from Bordeaux, a fruit which is still featured in so many tasty French recipes.

One early evening Steve and I headed down to see a movie at the newly opened big screen Century Movie Theatre on Winchester Boulevard.  We were an hour early for the movie, so we drove a few blocks over the freeway and parked in a prune orchard to wait under the shade of the trees.  There we sat and ate ripe, slightly wrinkled, golden-fleshed prune plums off the trees, finding it hard to stop even after eating our fill.  We declared them the best we ever had, our faces, fingers, and the steering wheel good and sticky from all the juice.  A good plum must be one of the culinary world’s true luxuries and the entire prune industry is based on that French plum. Some of the best one-layer eat-out-of-the-pan cakes I make now, known as kuchen in German, are with fresh plums settled into the top (look for the Fruit Kuchen recipe in my Quick Breads book).

The best-producing plums trees are grafted, a fact learned when Steve and I lived in the shade of what we thought was just a plum tree on Fremont Avenue in Los Altos Hills, then the middle of the orchards.  There are many varieties of mid-summer plums, all maturing at different times.  This unforgettable, almost magical, tree first produced crimson-fleshed Santa Rosas, whose purple-red skin must be the prototype for the color “plum.”  When they were gone, a pale yellow-green one with yellow flesh, a greengage (known as a Reine Claude to the French), appeared.  Then the last batch was a very large, blue-black plum, probably a Friar or Nubiana.  Each ripening was a surprise and each plum tasted, as well as looked, totally different from the next.  In competition with the birds, we ate every one.

Then there was the meltingly delicious summer pear, the Bartlett, named for Enoch Bartlett of Massachusetts.  Brought from England where it is known as the William, pears fared better in our western climate than New England.  Steve and I would drive over to Trimble Road off Highway 101 and forage for the fruit left on the trees after the pickers went through.  It was like trespassing into a foreign land. The quiet orchard had that faint musky pear aroma and the fruit had developed little russet dots and a trace of rosy blush on the yellow skin.  We’d have to be careful with the large ovals, as they were ripening on the tree and might be bruised or too soft.  Pears like to be picked while still under-ripe (pears ripen from the inside out and the cells change when left on the tree, making that mealy texture), but there would still be enough so I would have a nice batch for home-canning and apple-pear sauce. This area now is all commercial real estate and the soil black topped over.

One of my favorite pastimes used to be to look for vacant lots with bearing fruit trees still standing and head over in the evening to pick the unwanted fruit, stepping carefully on tiptoes amidst fallen fruit rotting on the ground. I made countless jars of wonderful jam, ice cream, canned fruit, pies, crisps, and cakes from those nefarious pickings. I would sit outside in the afternoon on an old wooden chair with a TV tray and cut and pit the fruit listening to the birds. Now its just the stuff of memories.

Without a vacant lot in sight, there is still great fruit grown in the spirit of the early Santa Clara Valley available at farmer’s markets, but the seasons are usually short and sweet.

Fresh Fruit Recipes

Small Batch Fresh Apricot Jam (Made in the Bread Machine)

Deborah Olson’s Amazing Cherry Crisp

springtime in the orchard-I grew up with this in my backyard over the fence

Apricot Jam by _e.t

I grew up in the Santa Clara Valley in Northern California, the home of the finest apricots grown in America because of it’s wonderful climate.  Unfortunately, the trees were gradually pulled out and houses built to create Silicon Valley, but dotted around backyards and vacant lots are a few precious apricot trees.  Apricot jam is just part of the legacy of living here and for good reason; it is luscious. Look for roadside stands and at farmer’s markets. The season is very short. Making jam was never so easy and no boiling of jars.

Overview

• Bread Machine
• Jam Cycle

• Makes about 2 1/2 cups

Ingredients

• 1 1/3 pounds (2 cups) pitted and chopped fresh apricots

• 1 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

• 1/2 box (1 3/4- or 2-ounces) powdered pectin

• 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar, or to taste

Instructions

1. Place the apricots and lemon juice in the bread pan of an automatic bread machine.  Sprinkle with the pectin.  Let stand 10 minutes.  Add the sugar.
2. Program the Jam setting and press start.  Jam finishes the cooling cycle at the beep.  Carefully remove the pan with heavy oven mitts and scrape with a rubber spatula into a spring top glass jar; let stand until cool.  Store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to 6 weeks, or spoon into small freezer bags and freeze.

Excerpted from The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook, by Beth Hensperger. (c) 2000, used by permission from the Harvard Common Press.