Trinidad Black Cake

I love black cake! Since living in New York, every year I would make my annual pilgrimage to Trinidad for Christmas to enjoy the festivities and sit in the kitchen with my mother to make black cake.  This year, was a little different...a winter wonderland in NYC instead. I decided to make the best of it.

Typical "trini" style, I waited until last minute (Christmas Eve to be exact) to make my first solo black cake. Of course, I decided to consult the infamous "Naparima Girls Cookbook" officially titled, "The Multi-Cultural Cuisine of Trinidad & Tobago & the Caribbean" which no Trinidadian should be without. It is the ultimate "trini" cooking bible!

However, panic stepped in when I saw that the recipe called for 8 eggs, a pound of this fruit and that and of course recommended that you soak your fruits at least 1 day or more in advance! Who has time for all of that? My cooking and baking skills are what I could call beginner and basic. Recipes involving too many ingredients or steps are intimidating to me. 

This brings me to the black cake recipe I found online and why I would give it 5 STARS especially for someone baking last minute with limited time. Special thanks to Simply Trini Cooking.

http://www.simplytrinicooking.com/2008/12/trinidad-black-cake.html

•  No pre-soaking of fruits required! That's right I soaked my fruits then and there on the spot and added it to the recipe. According to the site, "If you feel to make your black cake today you can make it." Also I like the fact, that only a portion of fruits are grinded/blended together and the reminder is left whole.
• 4 eggs! I know this may sound trivial but only having a dozen eggs, 8 eggs for the Naparima recipe is a bit too much! 
• 3 pounds of fruits-TOTAL!. Regardless if it's a combination of raisins, currents, cherries, mixed peel and prunes. A little of this and that goes a long way. You could actually save the remaining fruits to make sweetbread :)
• Browning. The pictures show making browning the traditional brown sugar way but I was able to use ready-made bottle browning and it worked like a charm! I used 1/2 cup of Chief Full Strength Browning. 1/2 cup is all you need. It is indeed "full strength".

Check it out yourself and let me know what you think. What recipe do you use to make black cake?

Comments

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Thank you Thereze for visiting and trying the black cake recipe. Lovely pic btw :-)