Spiced Fruit Traybake

A nice, easy, way to create a variety of cakes in one baking. You can use any cooked or dried fruit, or tinned fruit. I've made it with tinned cherries and apricots, with left-over poached pears, with (soaked) prunes and figs. You need quite big pieces - so say 3 cherries, a quarter of a pear etc.

Ingredients

50 ml light vegetable oil

200 g melted butter

200 g caster sugar

3 large eggs

235 g self raising flour

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp mixed spice

1 tsp vanilla essence

16 pieces of fruit (see above for suggestions)

Icing sugar to serve

Method

1 Preheat the oven to180 C Fan. Grease and line a 22 x 22 inch traybake tin (or similar).

2 Melt the butter and oil together in a small pan. Let cool.

3 Sieve the flour and spices into a large bowl.

4 Pour in the cooled oil/butter mix and add the eggs and vanilla. Mix well

5 Turn the mix into the prepared tin,

6 Now imagine your tray divided into 16 squares, and put one piece of fruit

onto each section - i.e. four across and four down. Don't push them in,

the cake will rise around them

7 Bake for approx 35 minutes. Test a part of the cake in the middle that

doesn't have fruit in it.

8 Allow to cool in the tine, then cut into 16 squares. Dredge half of each

square with icing sugar to serve.

Also nice served warm with cream or custard as a dessert.