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Dessert

Dried Fruit in Cakes

This recipe dries fruit in a sugar syrup, then sun‑dried or oven‑dried and stored in cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Dried Fruit in Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Heat water and sugar together until dissolved.

  2. Using a skimmer, dip the fruit into the sugar syrup for about 1 minute.

Dry the fruit

  1. Spread the dipped fruit on baking tins.

  2. Boil the remaining sugar down to a rich, thick syrup and pour it over the fruit.

  3. Place the fruit in the sun or a warm oven until it reaches a dried, gelatinous condition.

  4. Let the fruit dry completely, then store it in bags, dividing it into cakes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Fruit
Forms the main body of the dried product and carries the flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as a thick syrup, helps it set into a gelatinous, preserved texture.

The step that matters

Placing the fruit to dry until it reaches a gelatinous condition. Sugar slowly draws water out of the fruit as it dries. If the fruit is not dried long enough, it stays sticky and may spoil; if it is dried too harshly, it can harden or scorch.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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