Random Recipes No. 16 - Fruit Cocktail and Muesli Cake
However this concoction, believe it or not, came from a recipe book, and the randomness instead describes the method of selection of said recipe. The monthly Random Recipes challenge is hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen, who this month felt sorry for those poor recipes at the start and finish of books that are often overlooked. He asked us to randomly choose a cookbook from our libraries, then cook either the first or last recipe.
Since it is the 16th RR challenge, I decided to pick the 16th book on my shelf which turned out to be 'Waste Not Want Not' by Patrik Beer and Gunter Jaros.
The first recipe was for a ketchup based BBQ sauce, and I'm really not a ketchup fan, so I decided to go for the last one instead, on p246 - and found myself making "Muesli Cake" with the slightly cryptic subheading 'My first cake'.
This most definitely isn't my first cake, but it is easy, quick and tasty. It makes use of some store cupboard basics - tinned fruit cocktail, and muesli, which I'd certainly never have thought to combine in a cake before!
We ate it for tea on Saturday. Yep - you read that correctly. No main course. Just pud! We'd had a fantastic lunch cooked and hosted by the lovely P&P, so were still feeling fairly full. And we told ourselves that since it had lots of oats in it, it was almost healthy, right? (Note, just to clarify, Mini-M did NOT have this for her dinner - she had a proper tea with no fruit cocktail cake in sight!) We ate it as a slightly guilty pleasure after she had gone to bed.
As usual, I didn't have the right ingredients - no muesli, but I did have crunchy cereal, so I used that and reduced the sugar as it is already sweetened. Also (big confession) I couldn't find my scales - a temporary state of affairs thankfully that has now been remedied - so I just guessed. Bad me. They are probably the two main reasons that the picture in the book is of a kind of crumbly cake, with the instruction to alternate layers of fruit and muesli mix, and I instead ended up mixing it all together to make a more 'cake' cake. Still tasty though - phew!
Right - on to the recipe...
Fruit Cocktail Tropical Crunch Cake (Serves 4)
- 150g Tropical Crunch Cereal - or Muesli if you will
- 60g Plain Flour
- 1 Egg
- 1x 400g Tin Fruit Cocktail (drained)
- 2 tbsp Caster Sugar (3 if you're using unsweetened muesli)
- 2 tbsp Dairy Free Margarine
Firstly, preheat the oven to 200C (180C Fan). Put the crunchy cereal, margarine, flour and sugar in a bowl. Use a fork (or your fingers if you're feeling messy - that's what the original recipe suggested) to mash it all together. Add the egg and mix it in. Depending on the crumbliness of the mixture, you can either alternate layers of fruit and muesli mix in a baking tin, or, like me, add the fruit, give it all a good stir and pour it into a greased 20cm cake tin. Bake for 20-25 mins until lightly browned and springy to the touch. Enjoy it warm as a pudding, or leave to cool and cut into slices as a cake.
If you're a custard fan, I reckon a big dollop would complete the fruit-cocktail induced nostalgia. But speaking as a custard hater, it was lovely unadorned too!
