But what's tennis got to do with it?

It's been a while since I ticked off a fruit cake recipe, so yesterday I decided it was time to have a go at making tennis cake (p59). I'd got all the ingredients with my groceries - or so I thought. It would be quite uncharacteristic of me not to have forgotten any ingredients at all, and sure enough, I didn't bring home a lemon.


This required a quick trip to the supermarket. The Palms shopping mall has now reopened, and it's amazing how much I appreciate being able to just pop up there for a few things when I need to, something I once took for granted. There's nothing special about The Palms - it's just like any other shopping mall - but restoring a major retail area on the Eastern side of town is another big step towards normality.

Anyway, I returned from my brief trip to The Palms bearing the required lemon, and set to work. I began by creaming butter and sugar, then added vanilla and almond essences. Setting that bowl aside, I sifted the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and beat four eggs together in another, then mixed the dry ingredients and eggs alternately into the creamed mixture.

So I had my base mixture ready, but a fruit cake's got to have fruit in it too! The final ingredients added were raisins, glacé cherries, mixed peel (this was supposed to be angelica, but since I couldn't find any I decided to substitute the peel) along with juice and rind from the lemon.

A more organised person would have lined the cake tin before starting work on the cake. But of course, I'm not, so I hadn't. Struggling to find space amongst the mess on my kitchen bench, I managed to line my tin with a layer of brown paper and then one of baking paper, before spooning the mix in and plonking it in the oven for an hour and a half.

I used a 23cm round tin, as I don't have the 22cm one specified in the recipe. When I first began this challenge, I made a point of trying to find the correct size cake tin for each recipe, but since I now have quite a collection, I'm not really interested in buying any more. I generally just use whatever I have that's closest to the specified size. I'm not sure why there are so many different sized/shaped tins for the various Edmonds recipes; it would certainly be more practical if they stuck to one or two standard tin sizes. Are Edmonds getting a commission from cake tin manufacturers?

The cake came out looking pretty good, if not as high as it might have been in the proper 22cm tin. After allowing it to cool slightly, I cut myself a slice. It was pretty good: a light almondy fruit cake with a slight crunch around the edges. If you don't like glacé cherries, well, you won't like this cake. But if that's not an issue for you, it's an easy little cake with none of the heavy texture that's sometimes a problem with fruit cakes.