The best Christmas cake you’ll ever eat comes from Sri Lanka-By Rachel Bartholomeusz
Source:Sbs
This is the cake even fruit cake haters will love. It’s much closer to a flourless cake or a brownie than the usual rock-hard missiles that pass for Christmas cake elsewhere. But there’s a catch: you need to make it now for flavours to develop and the cake’s moisture to increase.
The Romans might have invented the fruitcake, but Sri Lanka, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, perfected it.
(Full disclosure: I am half Sri Lankan and thus prone to hyperbole, but you’ve just got to trust me.)
It might strike you as odd that a Buddhist-majority country is home to the best Christmas cake in the world, but it shouldn’t. This cake tells the story of the cultures that have passed through Sri Lanka, of a former Portuguese, then Dutch, then British colony that still loves Christmas.
Only 7 per cent of Sri Lanka’s population are Christian, but Christmas and Christmas cake – also known as rich cake, and available year-round in bakeries – spread much more successfully than Christianity.
It’s a specialty of Sri Lanka’s Burgher minority, a dwindling community of mixed Portuguese, Dutch, British and Sri Lankan heritage. Their cuisine borrows and mixes flavours and ingredients from east and west, and though there are few Burghers left in Sri Lanka, their cake lives on.
While your typical fruitcake has whole glace cherries and hunks of fruit peel suspended in a cake so dry I want a glass of water just thinking about it, this version is rich, moist and dark, with a prohibitively long list of ingredients.
In place of all that flour there’s rulang (semolina) and the cashews that grow so well in Sri Lanka’s climate, brought to the country by the Portuguese. The number of eggs gets ramped up to ridiculous quantities – recipes call for anywhere between 12 and 55 eggs, and more egg whites still. The batter is a heady mix of vanilla and rose water, almond essence, spices and brandy. To the usual glace cherries, peel and nuts, are added jars of the strawberry jam that the British couldn’t live without in Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, as well as preserved pumpkin, ginger, and chow chow (which is choko! I never knew).
It’s all chopped so very finely that the end result is much closer to a flourless cake or a brownie than the usual rock-hard missiles that pass for Christmas cake elsewhere. Best of all, while it improves with age, it’s perfectly good to eat straight away: handy when you’re operating on island time.