Thursday, December 25, 2008

Farm Up-date, Xmas Cake

I am often asked, " how do you cope eating only raw food at Xmas time, as it is usual to eat Xmas pudding or Xmas cake at this time. Our favourite way has been to make a layered fruit cake with only whole raw ingredients.

Our layered fruit cake has become so enjoyed by all that have ever tried it that it has almost become a staple for all occasions that we have a gathering at the farm. Its popularity is such too, that unless we proportionate it out, if you did not get in early you most possibly will have missed out. And it does not matter how large we make it, it never seems to be large enough.
The first step is to line the bowl with a dried fruit and nut mix which forms the pastry so to peak.
This is a mixture of dried fruits and nuts in which the nuts are finely ground and then mixed with the dried fruit, which mix is then put through a mincer. The resulting cake can then be stored as such, or as described in the "Farm Recipe Book" which gives an in-depth description of the ingredients and process involved, it may be rolled into balls, named by the Farm as "Goodie Balls".

The mix in this instance, is rolled out as thinly as you possibly can, and as mentioned, used to line the bowl. Also as a layer between the layers of fresh raw fruit. The above photo shows the lined bowl, and the ingredients used in each layer.

In our endeavours to roll the mixture as thinly as possible we came across the problem, that it did not seem to matter what we did, we could not stop it from sticking to the roller. That was until such time as some-one came up with the bright idea of doing so in a plastic bag. And no, you do not climb into the plastic bag to do it. You place the mix in there and use the roller on the outside, thus eliminating contact between the roller and the mix. It works perfectly.
In this photo you can see the layer of fruit after which we place a layer of mix before applying another layer of fuit. And so on.

In this instance we used Dragon fruit as our first layer, then mango, papaya, pineapple,banana, topped with grated coconut.

Scrumptious.

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