Fat free treat
Fancy a treat but still trying to keep on your New Year healthy eating plan? Why not make this spiced fruit and nut loaf, its baked with no butter and no other fats!! I know amazing right!
I grew up eating this fruit loaf as its one of my mums favorites, I always thought she got it from a cook book but after asking her yesterday its actually her own recipe, am well impressed :) The cake is baked using no butter, no oil and hardly any sugar. You still have fruit sugars from all the dried fruits that are in the loaf so its not a diet food but it sure is a lot healthier then your Victoria sandwich. This is a good cake to use up whatever dried fruit and nuts you have in your cupboard, mine has different ingredient every time I bake it depending of what I have lying around. Go and give it a try! You'll be surprised how good a skinny bake can taste
What you need:
- 300 grams of self raising flour (wholemeal if you want to make it even healthier)
- 75 grams of light brown sugar25 ml of honey
- 300 grams of raisins or any other dried fruit, I like to have at least 200 grams raisins and 100 grams of whatever other dried fruit I have around. Apples, apricots, figs etc.
- 100 grams of nuts (hazelnuts, walnuts and pecan are my favorite)
- 1 and 1/2 desert spoon of cookie spice mix (I use a Dutch premixed spice but you can make your own spiced cookie mix by mixing 4 tea spoons of cinnamon, 1 tea spoon of ground clove, 1 tea spoon of nutmeg, 1 tea spoon of ground ginger, 1/2 tea spoon of white pepper and 1/2 teaspoon of ground aniseed. Mix and keep in an airtight container)
- I like to add 2 aniseed cubes dissolved in a little bit of water, these are not easily available so If you don't have them leave them out or add a bit more ground aniseed instead.
- Around 250 ml of skimmed milk
Mix all these dry ingredients together in a large bowl and slowly add the milk until your mix has the thickness of yogurt. Maybe you need a little less milk maybe a little more.
Bake in a preheated oven on 175 Celsius for an hour until crisp on the outside but soft on the inside.
Perfect cold day treat, enjoy!
