Cake #101 - Spicy Advent Cake

Sunday Traditional Cake - Spicy Advent Cake aka Revamped Spicy Christmas Cake.

With this cake I am again back to my favourite warm spices - ground cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, ginger and cloves. 

Traditionally this cake is baked in a bundt cake pan and served plain, but this time I have made it round and decorated it with Physalis peruviana - which I have always found a fascinating fruit. It is beautiful and it is versatile as it goes well with both sweet and savoury cakes and dishes.

I find the various names for the fruit and etymology behind the names fascinating, too. Physalis, Cape gooseberry, goldenberry and ground cherry are the ones I had heard before. But there is more. In Finnish the fruit, for some reason, is very often called and sold as Ananaskirsikka which translates to Pineapple Cherry. The fruit has definitely nothing to do with pineapples (well, as much as pineapples have with pines and apples, I guess) but I can easily refer to cases where people have found the taste similar to pineapple.

As a non-native English speaker I sometimes end up in funny situations if I do not know some term in English and then I hastily try to translate something from Finnish - or try to use other languages I know as a source. Or even when I know but I just cannot get it. Like simply trying to find the logic why grape and grapefruit mean two totally different things. Grapes are berries but then they are defined to be fruit, too. Could not either of them just be renamed to avoid confusion? Not that I would ever have tried to make a glass of juice by juicing just one grape, or decorate a cake with 40 grapefruits. But there is always a risk those things could happen!

Spicy Advent Cake

Sponge
3 eggs
150 ml granulated sugar
150 ml (dark) syrup
150 g butter, melted
450 ml plain flour
1,5 tsp bread soda
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp ground cardamom
150 ml fresh cream

1. Preheat oven to 175C / 350F and grease and flour a Ø 20 cm cake pan.

2. Beat eggs and sugar until white and fluffy.

3. Fold in flour, spices and bread soda together with melted butter, syrup and cream.

4. Pour into pan and bake in the oven for about 40 minutes.

5. Let the sponge cool a little before removing from pan.

6. Spread icing on top and decorate with physalis (or other decorations of your choice).

Icing

150 g cream cheese
100 g soft butter
300 g icing sugar
2 tsp cinnamon

Beat all ingredients together but do not over mix as the icing will get too runny. (should this happen, add more icing sugar and place in fridge to set for an hour before spreading on cake)